For the past 15 years, a Lafayette company has built a national wound-care business out of an often-discarded byproduct of childbirth to help solve a nagging health care challenge affecting millions of people: untreated chronic wounds like bedsores and diabetic ulcers.
Tides Medical collects placentas, transforms them into skin substitutes and distributes them to hospitals, clinics and care facilities to treat chronic and surgical wounds. Over the years, it has used donated amniotic tissue from new moms across Acadiana to manufacture enough wound care patches to cover four basketball courts.
Annual revenue soared above $100 million as the company earned private and public sector accolades as a rare, vertically integrated Louisiana biotech company. But recent Medicare reimbursement changes aimed at preventing fraud have sharply disrupted the industry. As its core business of making skin grafts from placentas faces challenges, Tides is now looking to a new technology as an engine for its future growth.
Production process
The placenta is the body’s only nonimmunogenic organ — that means there’s no need to match blood types or do the same type of tissue-typing necessary when transplanting organs. And there’s almost no chance the body will reject it…