Placenta can help heal wounds and burns. Why do we throw them away?

Marcella Townsend remembers looking around the kitchen in shock. In the silence just after the explosion, before the pain set in, she found herself almost in awe of the smashed stove and the encased cupboards.

“It was like Bigfoot had walked over the counters,” she said.

In the wake of a propane explosion at her mother’s house in Savannah, Ga., in 2021, Ms. Townsend spent more than six weeks in an induced coma in a burn trauma unit. She had second and third degree burns over most of her body and her face had become unrecognizable.

Looking for a way to help her, surgeons turned to a rarely used tool: the human placenta. They carefully applied a thin layer of the donated organ to her face, which Ms Townsend said was “the best thing they could have ever done.” She still has scars from transplants elsewhere on her body, but the 47-year-old’s face, she said, “looks exactly as it did before.”

During pregnancy, the placenta forms in the uterus, where it supplies the fetus with nutrients and antibodies and protects it from viruses and toxins. It then follows the baby from the body, still filled with a wealth of stem cells, collagens and cytokines that doctors and researchers have realized also make it uniquely useful after birth.

Research has found that placenta-derived grafts can reduce pain and inflammation, heal burns, prevent the formation of scar tissue and adhesions around surgical sites, and even restore vision. They are also gaining popularity as a treatment for the widespread problem of chronic wounds.

And yet, most of the roughly 3.5 million placentas delivered in the United States each year still end up in biohazard disposal bags or hospital incinerators. It rattles Mrs Townsend, who returned to her job as a surgical assistant with a new perspective. “I’m constantly in these hospitals that don’t donate or use the placental tissue,” she said. “I hear the obstetrician say, ‘I don’t need to send it to pathology or anything; just trash it.’ I shudder every time.”