Valencia-based Avita Medical Inc. is expanding its unique approach to treating burns and wounds: taking skin cells harvested from other areas of the body and spraying them onto the impacted skin.

Over the last couple of years, Avita has won U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals for variations on its device that takes skin cell samples and stretches them out so they can be sprayed on to burns and wounds.

The company has also recently acquired products from other companies that aid with its spray-on skin-cell technology and is preparing to take those products to market. One of those products, a matrix for the spray-on cells to grab onto, is slated to hit the market this month.

It’s all part of a major effort to expand the market for its spray-on skin cell technology, either through increasing the types of wounds and burns that can be treated or by making it easier for surgeons and others to use the technology – or both.

“We’ve developed a portfolio of new products that make our technology applicable to a larger market,” says Jim Corbett, chief executive for Avita Medical.

Corbett says the hope is to boost revenue enough to enable the company to achieve what so far has been an elusive goal for its investors: profitability.

Avita Medical last year posted revenue of $64.3 million but also recorded a loss of $61.8 million. With its expanding product portfolio, the company has put forward to its investors revenue guidance for this year of between $100 million and $106 million.

“If we can achieve that revenue, then we believe we can achieve profitability by the fourth quarter of this year and we have told our investors this,” Corbett says.

Overcoming disbelief of ‘spray-on cells’

Avita’s technology, encapsulated in a device the company calls Recell, takes skin cells scraped from a small site on the patient’s body, then stretches out those cells in a solution to cover a surface area of up to 80 times the size of the sample site. Then an applicator attached to the device sprays on the skin cells in a thin coat over the patient’s burn or wound.

“When we first bring up our technology with surgeons or hospital administrators, they say they’ve never heard of or considered the idea of using a spray-on skin cell product to treat burns or wounds,” Corbett says. “So, we have to engage in an education process.”

Avita’s device is aimed at hospital emergency rooms, trauma centers, burn treatment centers and other similar locales. It is intended for burns and wounds brought about by a traumatic incident, such as a fire, a vehicle collision or a bullet from a gunshot. It is not intended for chronic wounds, such as bedsores.

Avita’s first-generation device received FDA approval in 2018. A few years later, Avita unveiled a second-generation product that automated the harvesting of the skin cells to go into the device, eliminating the need for someone to manually scrape off the skin cells.

Late last year, Avita received FDA approval for a variation of its Recell device that treats small-scale wounds. To do this, the skin cells are not spread out as much in the solution.

Using Recell to treat second-degree burns

One prominent surgeon who uses Avita’s Recell devices is Peter Grossman, medical director of the internationally renowned Grossman Burn Centers based in West Hills.

Grossman has been using the Recell technology on patients with second degree burns that had high risk of becoming deeper burns.

“I noted expedited healing and excellent outcomes in those patients,” Grossman says. “It’s given me the opportunity to speed up the healing process, decrease the time it takes for wounds to heal, and decrease the amount I take of donor site from the patient that I previously had needed for partial thickness burns.”

Avita has recently focused on wound dressing applications to augment its Recell technology. Early last year, Avita reached an agreement with Carlsbad-based Stedical Scientific Co. to market Stedical’s wound dressing matrix known as PermeaDerm. The dressing is transparent, allowing for checkups on the wound recovery process without having to pull off the dressing and then apply a new one.

Also last year, Avita won approval for a dermal matrix product called Cohealyx that was co-developed with Paramus, New Jersey-based Regenity Biosciences. Coehealyx is used to regenerate vascular connections in wounds that fully penetrate the skin layer, speeding up the healing process. Cohealyx is slated to hit the market this month.