MariCell™ Intensive Foot Repair Cream is the most advanced product in the Kerecis development pipeline. Market tests will start late 2010 and market launch is estimated in Q3, 2011.

MariCell Intensive Foot Repair cream is a patent-pending, quad-action formula especially developed to improve the health of the diabetic foot.

• High concentration of marine lipids (mOmega3™); including highly potent essential fatty acids that help maintain and repair the outermost layer of the skin
• mCollagen™ marine derived proteins help the skin's building blocks to strengthen, maintain and condition the skin.
• Reduces and softens callosities
• Minimizes skin cracking and wound formation

Technical Overview

Preventing ulcers is crucial in the care of the diabetic foot. The main reason ulcers form in the diabetic foot is that callosities thicken to a point where pressure sores and fissures develop and do not heal.

The diabetic foot often has dry atrophic skin because the outermost layer of the skin has difficulty retaining moisture. Diabetics typically lose some of the filling material between the corneal cells, so that the skin on the feet appears stretched and dry. MariCell Intensive Foot Repair Cream contains multiple lipids including, essential fatty acids that act as filling material between the corneal cells, reducing skin atrophy.

MariCell Intensive Foot Repair Cream reduces and softens callosities. In diabetic patients neuropathy often causes abnormal weight distribution of the foot, resulting in the formation of skin callosities. The product breaks down these callosities and prevents new ones from forming.

MariCell Intensive Foot Repair Cream helps the corneal layer of the skin retain moisture, preventing fissure formation.

MariCell Intensive Foot Repair Cream should be applied onto the feet once or twice daily using gloves. The cream should not be applied between the toes.

The benefits of marine lipids

The outermost layer of the skin consists of 15 to 20 cell layers of living cells that die and dry out to build the corneal layer of the skin. The living cells are the epidermal layer and the dried-out cells are the corneal layer.

Between the dried cells in the corneal layer is the intercellular substance, which is rich in lipids that keep the structure intact and watertight. This is often referred to as the "brick and mortar" model of the skin, the dry cells being the "bricks" and the lipids the "mortar." The corneal layer of the feet in the diabetic foot tends to lose these lipids. When the "mortar" is missing, the corneal layer dries out and no longer protects the living cells below. This mechanism upsets the living cells, resulting in a loss of volume. This causes skin tightness and inflammation, as well as the formation of callosities and, eventually, fissures and ulcers.

MariCell Intensive Foot Repair Cream provides the skin with proprietary, marine-derived essential fatty acids (mOmega3™) and marine derived collagen proteins (mCollagen™). Both benefit the cell walls and act as intracellular lipids or "mortar", which supplements the reduced intracellular lipids, relieves skin tightness and protects the health of the epidermal cells below.

MariCell Intensive Foot Repair Cream is so effective because of the nature of its essential fatty acids (EFA), mOmega3™, and because of its extra cellular-like proteins, mCollagen™. EFA's fall into three main groups: alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). mOmega3™ is especially potent as it is derived from marine sources and contains EPA and DHA. This is in contrast to ALA, which is often plant derived and needs to be converted by the body to EPA and DHA to be useful. The skin, however, cannot do this conversion. The extra cellular-like proteins bind to the lipids to create an optimal, lipid-like, intracellular filling material.

Topically applied plant-derived fatty acids (for example, those derived from flax seed oil) are unusable by the skin as they need to be converted to EPA and DHA before the body can use them. The skin has no mechanism to perform this conversion.

MariCell Intensive Foot Repair Cream can be applied directly to the skin so that the EPA and DHA get right where it counts, helping prevent skin hardening, drying, scaling and flaking.

Technical Benefits