Horizon Health Physician Travels to Iceland

Receives award for wound-healing fish skin

Dr. Brittany Wojnicki, podiatrist at Horizon Health, goes the extra mile for her patients. In this case, make it 3,000 miles.

Dr. Wojnicki recently traveled to Iceland as an attendee at the Northern Lights Workshop, a clinical education event to advance the knowledge of using fish skin to manage chronic wounds and lower extremity injuries. Dr. Wojnicki was a keynote speaker, highlighting her successes using fish skin to heal patient wounds.

The event was sponsored by Kerecis, an Icelandic company and global pioneer in the use of fish skin to regenerate human tissue. The company’s core product – naturally occurring Omega-3 Fish Skin – comes from wild Atlantic cod, which is the primary fish in Iceland. When grafted onto a burn or diabetic wound, the material recruits the body's own cells and is ultimately converted into living tissue.

At the workshop, Dr. Wojnicki received the Kerecis company’s 2022 Aurora Award for using fish skin to treat a patient’s severe diabetic wounds, which ultimately saved her legs.

“She was supposed to have two lower leg amputations and her wounds were healed in only two months with the fish skin,” Dr. Wojnicki explained.

Dr. Wojnicki also won the Aurora Award last year for a case involving a diabetic man who had a leg amputated and was about to lose the other.

“The fish skin has defied a lot of the odds,” she said. “Sometimes we can’t believe what it has healed. I feel we’re doing pretty good things in our little wound center [at Horizon Health].”

The Horizon Health Wound Clinic provides treatment for various types of non-healing wounds, including burns, infected wounds, and ulcers. Dr. Wojnicki has used fish skin for successful wound healing for the past three years.

“We’ve saved four patients from amputation using the Kerecis fish skin,” she said. “When someone gets a below-knee amputation their life expectancy decreases by 50 percent. Fish skin is one tool that can help avoid amputations in some instances.”