Fish collagen for skin wound healing: a systematic review in experimental animal studies

Collagen extracted from fishes has been appearing as an alternative for commercial porcine and bovine collagen and it has been considered interesting especially for membrane manufacturing in tissue engineering. Despite the positive in vitro effects of fish collagen membranes, there is still no understanding of all the benefits that this natural biomaterial plays in the wound healing process, due to the lack of compilation of the results obtained in animal studies. In this sense, the purpose of this study was to perform a systematic review of the literature to examine the effects of fish collagen membranes for skin wound healing in experimental models of skin wound. The search was carried out according to the orientations of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA), and the descriptors of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) were defined: "fish," collagen," "skin," and "in vivo". A total of 10 articles were retrieved from the databases PubMed and Scopus. After the elegibility analyses, this review covers the different origins of fish collagen reported in the different papers from the beginning of 2015 through the middle of 2021. The results were based mainly on histological analysis and macroscopic evaluation, and fish skin collagen was responsible for improving the wound healing rate and the process of reepithelization and collagen deposition. In conclusion, fish skin collagen has shown positive results in in vivo studies and may be a potential biomaterial in tissue engineering.