Annually, the challenge of treating poorly healing wounds results in a staggering financial burden of approximately $250 billion. This underscores the critical demand for innovative solutions and greater emphasis on wound care management. Recently, both Mexico and the UAE have sanctioned a groundbreaking medical device designed to address chronic wounds. Jasen Petersen, CEO and co-founder of the Ionic Alliance Foundation, Inc. (IAF), emphasizes that this development signifies more than just a new product entering the marketplace.

The innovation, known as Ion Biotechnology Aqueous Ligands (IBAL), represents a novel class of therapeutic technology. Designed as a microimmune restorative, IBAL operates through a unique physical-chemical mechanism, setting it apart from conventional pharmacologic, metabolic, or immunologic approaches. Petersen asserts this differentiation is crucial for expanding accessibility and affordability in healing by reshaping regulatory frameworks.

Petersen critiques the current wound care landscape, suggesting it often employs counterproductive methods that escalate treatment costs. He argues that these methods tend to combat cellular biology rather than aid the body’s intrinsic healing capabilities. He notes that while antimicrobials are used to eradicate pathogens, they may inadvertently damage healthy tissue, leading to cellular trauma and inferior tissue quality. This, he contends, can perpetuate a cycle of interventions that disrupt natural healing, hindering genuine biological recovery.

Jasen Peterson (provided)

Petersen advocates for the IBAL formulation as a more natural approach to wound care. He highlights that this method focuses on supporting cellular biology through a series of synergistic actions. The process begins with pathogen elimination using non-threatening agents, aiming to restore the microimmune environment and redox balance. This, in turn, allows cells to progress naturally through their healing journey. Rather than relying on aggressive interventions, Petersen believes that restoring the cellular ecosystem can facilitate effective pathogen clearance. “Our goal is to introduce an intervention that collaborates with cellular biology to accelerate healing, thereby reducing the need for intrusive treatments that could prolong recovery,” he explains. Furthermore, IAF provides the foundational formula, allowing other companies to create and market their own specialized products.

Economically, Mexico’s approval of the device marks a significant shift. Petersen notes that the device’s classification as a medical device, rather than a pharmaceutical drug, could lead to reduced costs and faster development timelines.

“A device like this has the potential to reach the market in one to three years with $250,000 to $5 million in development, as opposed to the cost of drug development, which could be a lot more,” he says. He believes this classification could allow humanitarian pricing from day one, potentially sidestepping the financial pressures that have made chronic disease management the 90% driver of healthcare costs.

For diabetic foot ulcers alone, the total annual costs range between $9 to $13 billion in the US. “Add psoriasis, eczema, or non-melanoma skin cancer, and the impact could become staggering,” he notes.

IBAL’s formulation encompasses diverse delivery methods, including topical, nebulized, injectable, and even IV infusion, each designed to address dozens of conditions where local ion imbalance and oxidative stress drive dysfunction. Petersen believes the science is consistent, so development costs remain at device-level efficiency. “Each delivery method leverages the same underlying platform, meaning we can treat multiple conditions with minimal incremental cost,” he says.

With the medical device development pathway opened up, Petersen believes the challenge shifts from raising capital to ensuring mission-aligned governance. The expense of conventional development processes requires almost exclusive focus on ROI extraction. “Salutogenic treatments could emerge from these systems, but following the conventional playbook would make them expensive even when they don’t need to be, pricing out the populations who need them most,” Petersen states.

He believes Decentralized Science (DeSci) offers an alternative governance structure. Communities fund milestones directly and participate in governance through tokens that grant decision-making rights. This aligns funder incentives with patient access rather than ROI extraction.

The IAF aims to demonstrate the full DeSci lifecycle, from funding research through achieving regulatory approval to scaling deployment and ensuring affordable patient access. “Many DeSci projects fund hypothesis testing with uncertain outcomes,” Petersen says. He believes IBAL presents a different risk profile: funding deployment of a regulatory-approved platform, with risk isolated primarily to execution. “DeSci creates an alternative,” Petersen notes. “The conventional playbook is no longer the only path forward.”

Ultimately, Petersen argues that the approvals from Mexico and the UAE demonstrate that a salutogenic platform can reach patients through an alternative development path. Regulatory approval, he notes, is no longer a theoretical milestone. It is operational proof that a platform can safely and effectively support cellular healing.

Mexico validated a paradigm, not just a new treatment. The remaining question, in Petersen’s view, isn’t whether salutogenic medicine can work, or whether the platform has broad applicability, or whether device economics enable affordable access. Those questions have been answered. The remaining question: Does an alternative development community emerge, or does IBAL default to conventional pathways?

Petersen believes DeSci can work. Without sufficient community support, IBAL follows the conventional playbook, and the paradigm proof becomes just another blockbuster product. But if IAF demonstrates that DeSci can take a salutogenic platform from approval to deployment, it creates a template. Other healing technologies that don’t fit the conventional playbook would have a path forward. The implications extend beyond IBAL.