Do Cisgender Cellular Tissue Products Impact Wound Healing?

Dr. Christina Del Pin shares key details and background from her brief report, “Cisgender Cellular Tissue Products Improve Wound Healing.” Read the full paper here.

Transcript

Christina Del Pin, MD:

I am Dr. Christina Del Pin, and I am affiliated with Northwell Health, and I'm an assistant professor at Zucker School of Medicine. At Hofstra, our research paper was on skin substitutes that were used in our center. It showed that, in the review, that there were patients that were treated with both the male CTP, engineered with living human keratinocytes and fibroblasts, and also folks that were treated with placental membranes. And these CTP cases were pulled out of our registry, and we looked at the data and the healing rates. The significant finding was the cisgendered grafts did better, meaning the men that were treated with male type grafts had better healing rates than the opposite. And females that were treated with the placental products also did better.

So, looking back, I had been asked to a skin substitute workshop for the Northwell Wound Collaborative, for March of 2020. I had been to the SAWC fall meeting, and there was, you know, over 75 different skin substitutes at that meeting being presented. And, it got canceled and put off. And so we decided to do a retrospective review to look at everything that we had done from 2016 to 2020. And, it turned out that the IRB, after they approved everything, of course, we ended up doing this registry and looking at all the data and these are the findings that we had, that the folks that had their cisgender grafts ended up doing potentially better than the ones that were not.

Well, I had a feeling about it. I just thought that the women were not doing as good as the men. And then sometimes they surprised me; they did very well. At the same way on the men's side, the men tend to do better with the Apligraf. It confirmed my suspicion. I was really happy when I did the data and it came out, and then I had a statistician do it, and he actually confirmed what I had found as well. That was surprising. Well, it wasn't surprising. It was what I had thought, but I was happy to get it confirmed.  Also there was some issue that we did have a lot of venous…venous and arterial were different, venous were more difficult to close than men. I had kind of known that, but in the end, it was confirmed also. And there was a little racial disparity. I think we really have to dig into that a little bit more on future studies.

Well, I think the prospective studies are probably better. We had some poor follow up after, you know, 3 grafts. Sometimes people didn't come back to show us that they had healed. We really want to get people to come in so that we can get, you know, complete sets of data. We had a little bit of a drop off at the end. And I think we'll probably work on also, on top of the male and female issue, racial issue. And also non-human CTPs. We really do wanna do porcine. I haven't gotten into all the other types, but to work on some of that CTP research as well.