Burn Injuries

The American Burn Association (ABA) estimates that acute burn injuries requiring emergency and medical treatment affect nearly a million Americans each year, with approximately 50,000 hospitalizations and 4,000 deaths annually. According to the National Burn Repository (NBR) of the ABA, more than 500,000 with burn injuries received medical treatments in U.S. burn centers in 2019. Over 50% of the estimated U.S. acute hospitalizations related to burn injury were worsened due to the well-known burn conversion phenomena, and required intensive and prolonged treatments. The healthcare costs of burn injuries are prodigious. The average charges for hospital care of a burned patient range from $47,557 to $1,203,410 (average $92,377), with much higher costs incurred by patients with extensive burns. The length of hospital stays ranges from one day to hundreds of days (mean 9.7), and, for patients 80 years and older is more than twice the hospital stays for children under 5. Assuming that the average cost of each burn injury of the 50,000 hospitalized patients in the USA is around $92,377, the annual cost of all burn-related injuries is more than $4.6 billion. Unfortunately, the presented number by the ABA reflect global burden. 

 

Burns are different from acute traumatic and surgical wounds. They are dynamic injuries that may aggressively deteriorate within hours after the initial injury if not properly and immediately treated. The worst-case scenario is the development of secondary burn progression complication, also called burn conversion, in which the burn injury expands horizontally and vertically and converts a first or second-degree burn to a third-degree burn. This complication is due to the accelerated death of cells which surround the burnt skin. When secondary burn progression occurs, wound healing is slow, hypertrophic scarring occurs, hospital stays are prolonged, surgeries, such as split-thickness skin grafts are often needed, and the cost of treatment increases. Importantly, secondary burn progression is potentially life-threatening due to a propensity for infection.

 

Superficial skin burn lesions and second-degree burns constitute a major risk in our daily life. If not properly and immediately treated, these burn injuries can aggressively worsen within hours after the initial injury. Superficial skin burn lesions would heal in a short-time with conservative therapies. Nevertheless, third-degree burn wounds present big challenges due to a long-time healing period, pain and reinjury at wound dressing changes, infections and increased mortality rate. Currently, management of a burn injury is restricted to supportive treatments which comprise intravenous fluid infusions, sterile dressings, and antibiotics. These treatments do not prevent secondary burn progression. Currently, there are no FDA-approved therapeutics which promote the healing of a burn injury and target secondary burn progression. Therefore, the insufficiency for a therapy which can immediately stabilizes a burn injury and prevents the development of secondary burn progression is an unmet medical need.

 

The primary goal of a doctor or a burn wound care provider is to provide emergency therapy for individuals with burn injuries before medical help arrives to prevent secondary burn progression, stabilize burn injuries, accelerate healing and reduce burn injury complications. It is here where Remedor's innovation will take part by preventing burn conversion and its related complications. Contrary to the current proposed interventions that are suitable for care in the clinic and which cannot be achieved in emergency environments, Remedor's topical hydrogel technology has shown to be effective when it was used as emergency therapy for preventing secondary burn progression following second-degree burn injuries.