Dehydrated human amnion/chorion membrane

Tissue regeneration and the use of the matrix allograft became the gold standard in the treatment of non-wound healing and tissue repair in these years. The treatment aims to repair and replace the damaged tissues with healthy, fully functional and free of scar tissues. The healing process is a complex process including different phases:

hemostasis
inflammation
proliferation
remodelling

A lot of reasons could interrupt the normal healing process. The goal of the regenerative treatment is to modulate all the stages of the wound healing in order to promote the body’s repair.

Allograft means using preserved donor tissues and implanting it into a different patient. The Matrix allograft – dehydrated human amnion/chorion membrane is a tissue derived from the inner and outer layers of amniotic sac (it is a bag of fluid inside a woman’s womb, the uterus, where the unborn baby develops and grows). It has got two different parts, the amnion (it is in contact with the fetus) and chorion membranes (it is in contact with the uterus). The tissue is subjected to a decellularization process in order to remove all cellular components, preventing immune rejection, preserving collagen-rich extracellular matrix, regulatory proteins, glycoproteins and growth factors and specialty proteins. All these elements provide a direct stimulation of the healing process helping the cell differentiation, cell migration and recruiting the mesenchymal and regional stem cells.

The tissue is dehydrated. This process preserves the tissue without the need of freezers, dry ice or liquid nitrogen. The tissue proteins remain preserved. In the wound the tissue secretions rehydrated the matrix, returning the tissue to the original status. Once the matrix allograft is hydrated, the matrix is active and it can be degraded by the wound, becoming incorporated into the host tissue.

The treatment with dehydrated human amnion/chorion membrane has a wide range of clinical indications, for different kind of wounds. Numerous scientific articles, clinical cases and case series have been published for the treatment of lower extremity ulcers, for the management of diabetic foot ulcers, as an alternative treatment of skin grafting in plastic clinical cases, in the treatment of venous leg ulcers, acute traumatic wounds, burns and selected clinical case with pressure injuries.

In these last years, it has been used even for treatment in ophthalmology, orthopaedic, otorhinolaryngology, dermatology, dentistry, and so on.