A Colombian company offering new hope to burn victims and other patients who suffer skin tissue loss is one of the 26 MassChallenge top finalists who'll compete on Oct. 30 for a piece of the start-up accelerator's $1.5 million in cash prizes.
Keraderm was founded in Bogota in 2010 by a group of plastic surgeons, who set out to find an affordable, painless way of treating tissue loss resulting from burns, ulcers, tumors and trauma.
The typical treatment calls for a graft to be taken from a patient's healthy skin and meshed to cover a large wound — a surgical procedure that often results in severe pain, significant scarring and, sometimes, rejection by the patient's body.
But Keraderm's team found that by taking a sample of healthy skin less than one centimeter in diameter from behind a patient's ear, within five to seven days they could reproduce the skin cells and plant them on a collagen sheet four times the size of a business card to cover the wound, said Jorge Soto, the company's chief financial officer.
"It starts to heal the injury by accelerating the growth of healthy skin cells," Soto said. "In 20 to 40 days, the wound is completely healed."
The patent-pending procedure, which eliminates the need for an operating room and anesthesia as well as the possibility of rejection, has been successfully done on more than 100 patients so far in 11 different hospitals in Colombia and entails no pain or scarring, he said.
A 10-by-10-centimeter sheet of skin also costs $550, significantly less than a skin graft operation does.
"There are other variations of what we're doing," Soto said, "but we haven't been able to find anyone doing the same thing."
Keraderm hopes to expand the procedure in Latin America before bringing it to the United States, where it would need to be tested in a clinical trial to gain regulatory approval.
That's a process that would take the kind of money the company, which has only eight employees including Soto, does not yet have, he said.
The team bootstrapped the start-up with $50,000 and in 2012 raised an additional $300,000 from angel investors, allowing it to open a lab in Bogota that June, Soto said.
But even if Keraderm doesn't win any money in MassChallenge, he said, the four-month accelerator, for which they were selected out of a field of nearly 1,200 applicants, has been worth it.
"I never even thought I was going to be here," Soto said. "It's going to help me a lot to show we have a product that is working."
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