Autologous Multilayered Leukocyte, Platelet, and Fibrin Patch for Diabetic Ulcers: A Case Series

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Tyson Green. I'm a podiatrist in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I run a large wound care center there and I'm part of the Center for Orthopedics, which is a large orthopedic group.

Can you share your recently presented case series from SAWC Fall using the autologous multilayered leukocyte, platelet and fibrin patch for diabetic ulcers?

The 3C Patch is what it's called, formerly the Leuko patch, is what we did our case series on and it's basically where we're able to spin down the patient's blood, send it through a special centrifuge that not only coagulates and compacts the patch into a workable, you don't want to call it a graft, but a specimen that you're able to apply to the wound. That has platelet rich, so over 3 billion platelets that are retained in that and it gives you something a little bit more pliable, but formerly when we used to do PRP on wounds it was pretty hard to manage and do you squirt it on the wound, do you add it to something, it doesn't really give you a scaffolding, whereas the 3C Patch did. So when we did this case series with patients, that's kind of the thing that drew us to it was something that was a little bit easier to use.

The results were, I guess, remarkable enough to where we did a case series on it. We saw a level of healing that we really haven't seen in a lot of other products and it's very, very impressive on how quickly it started to kind of jumpstart the wound. It gives the wound everything it needs to heal, so it's not a graft, but it's more of a kind of a jumpstart to the wound. You're not looking for complete coverage of the wound, you're looking at something that just gets the wound everything it needs to heal. So we saw a pretty drastic result with it right away. With those patients that have stalled and they're hard to heal wounds that really just haven't responded to anything else. I think the results of the actual cases that we presented, I mean, it's going to impact us based on how well it does. But at the same time, I think the patient response and the way the patient interaction happened with this was something I didn't expect. Because you are taking the patient's blood, so you're taking something, a wound that hasn't healed with all the fancy wound care that we've applied to it, and then you ask the patient for help. And you get their own blood, and they're able to contribute that and put it into this patch.

So the patient has an ownership in it. So next thing you know, these patients are buying into it. They're coming back the next week saying, "I got you a really good patch because I made sure I didn't, I refrained from drinking, I didn't smoke that much this week, I ate pretty well this week." So they're taking ownership in their wound, which we really don't see very often. The response when they heal it is pretty funny because they'll have that interaction with you saying that "You couldn't heal it, so I went ahead and healed it." And I don't care who heals it, as long as that patient gets better. So I think that was something that was very surprising about the entire process. But it's something I definitely go forward with in my practice.