There’s maggots in Burnaby Hospital, but don’t worry, they’re meant to be there.
An antiquated and seemingly strange medical application of maggots for non-healing wounds popularly used at Burnaby’s hospital is now becoming a product two private companies are trying to commercialize.
Superna Life Sciences and Monarch Labs have applied for regulatory approval to make Medical Maggots, a prescription-only medical therapy used to clean non-healing wounds.
Lisa Hegler is a registered nurse and wound-care professional at Burnaby Hospital, and she spearheaded the maggot debridement therapy where she works, and says she’s benefited from using maggot therapy on more than 100 patients.
“It’s an old way of doing things,” Hegler told the Burnaby NOW in a phone interview. “It dates right back to the Napoleon civil wars.”
The therapy involves a sickly wound open to infection that is grey, green or brown, and two millimetre in length maggots.
“They’re little larvae,” Hegler explained. “Very, very tiny. It’s not what you see in the movies.”
However, the maggots do get bigger after 48 hours in the wounds – growing up to 10 or 15 times in size.
“Wounds are painful to begin with,” Hegler added. “The 48-hour period can be uncomfortable.”
The wound is given special dressings to help reinforce a caged dressing, to ensure the maggots don’t leave that specific area.
“Every now and then we get an escapee,” Hegler noted. “But we have nurses who closely monitor the integrity of the dressing and kill the escapee. What do you do when a mosquito lands on you? You smush it. It’s the same.”
After one or more sessions with the maggots, the wound goes back to a pink or a red colouring, which means it will heal normally, according to Hegler.
Despite the success Hegler says she’s experienced, Health Canada has yet to approve the therapy, but Burnaby is able to use it under the special access program law.
Hegler said Health Canada needed more data behind the therapy, noting the government is now willing to read the literature behind it. The two categories it can fall under is medicine or a medical device.
“That’s where part of the struggle is,” she noted. “We would like to say it’s a medical device. I have lots of petitions people have signed, wanting to get maggots here in B.C. There are quite a number of clinics in the Lower Mainland that do maggot … therapy.”
Burnaby Hospital has been identified as a pioneer behind the therapy by Monarch Labs, but it will not receive a royalty from any sales because it did not participate in the medicine’s production.
“Canadian patients live in one of the few developed countries that still do not have access to approved medicinal maggots,” said Dr. Ron Sherman, lab director and co-founder of Monarch Labs, in a media release.
Vancouver-based Monarch was founded in 2005 and is also developing new products including leech therapy for venous congestion, and fecal microbiota transplantation for C. difficile infections. For more information, visit www.monarchlabs.com.
Superna Life Sciences is also a Canadian company specializing in orphan diseases and supportive care cancer treatments. For more information, visit www.supernapharma.com.
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