TUESDAY, June 3, 2025 (HealthDay News) — When Eliana DeVos plays with her Ariel doll, her mom can’t help but get emotional.

“I call her my little mermaid,” Krystal DeVos, who lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, told CNN.

What makes that nickname extra special is the surprising way Eliana’s life was saved — through the use of fish skin.

Eliana was born extremely premature, at just 23 weeks and weighing just one pound.

She spent 131 days in neonatal intensive care, where she developed a severe, fast-spreading infection on her neck that doctors say nearly took her life.

“It was almost like a flesh-eating disease,” her mom said. “Her body was attacking something in her neck.”

The infection led to sepsis, a dangerous condition that can shut down the organs. As her condition worsened, her family and doctors looked for anything that might help.

That’s when doctors at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, offered a new option: using fish skin to help her wound heal.

Dr. Vanessa Dimas, a pediatric plastic surgeon at Driscoll, said Eliana was too fragile for surgery or a human skin graft.

“She was a premature baby. The wound was very extensive. And she was pretty sick,” Dimas said.

Instead, she and wound care nurse practitioner Roxana Reyna used a medical honey solution to clean the wound. Then they added fish skin, a medical product made from wild North Atlantic cod, to help it close and heal.

The fish skin — made by the Icelandic company Kerecis — acts like a scaffold, helping new skin tissue grow. It’s close to human skin in structure and contains omega oils and other natural healing elements.

“Once it basically does its job helping the wound heal, it sort of just melts away,” Dimas said.

In Eliana’s case, the results came quickly. After just three days, doctors noticed “dramatic” improvements. They changed her dressings every three days.

Ten days after the first fish skin treatment, her wound had closed — with little scarring and no surgery, CNN reported.

“There were no adverse reactions,” Dimas and Reyna wrote in a report presented in March at the European Wound Management Association Conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Three years later, Eliana’s scar is barely visible.

The doctors say she was likely the first preemie so small to receive this treatment.

Fish skin has been used for wound care around the world, but not often in children — and especially not in babies as small as Eliana.

Dr. Arun Gosain, chair of plastic surgery at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, said other types of animal tissue have also been used for wound healing.

“There are other forms of what we call xenografts, or taking tissue from another species and using it for wound healing,” Gosain said.

They come from animals like pigs or cows.

They don’t replace skin but can act as temporary dressings to keep a wound clean and help healing begin. Still, Gosain cautioned that not all wounds will heal with these methods.

Further, doctors must be careful about allergies — especially to fish. In babies, it’s not always clear whether they have allergies.

“That would be the biggest risk: an unknown allergy that could potentially cause some problems,” Dimas said. “Other than that, there’s still a chance that the kid may need surgery, because we don’t know how much this is going to help us heal the child.”

For Eliana’s mom, the experience was inspiring.

“What I hope people take away is that we can be grateful for modern medicine and the power of faith,” she told CNN.

“Never be fearful to try something new. Always be open-minded and just have faith,” she said. “If something sounds different or you’ve never been exposed to it before, just take a chance and have a little faith. And in our case, it worked out really great.”

More information

The National Institutes of Health has more on fish skin for wound dressings.

SOURCE: CNN, June 2, 2025

What This Means For You

This treatment could offer a less invasive way to heal serious wounds.