A new study published in Collagen and Leather on 16 July 2026 reports that oral fish-derived collagen peptides accelerated skin wound closure in diabetic mice and in cultured human skin. The product tested was Naticol, a commercial preparation supplied by Weishardt International.

The work was done in mice, cultured human cells and surgical skin samples kept alive in a dish. No patients with chronic wounds were given the supplement, and the authors say clinical efficacy remains to be established. Naticol is hydrolyzed mainly from tilapia and Pangasius skins and consists of type I collagen fragments at 95 to 97 percent and type III fragments at 3 to 5 percent, averaging about 2 kDa.

What the mice showed

High-fat-diet diabetic mice received 0.8 cm excisional wounds, with the treated group drinking water containing 0.1 g/kg/day of the peptides. By day 4, wound closure reached 39.5 percent in supplemented animals against 5.75 percent in controls, and by day 12 the gap was 93.8 percent versus 62.1 percent. Controls needed another five days to close fully. The same acceleration appeared in db/db mice, a second diabetic model, which is the more persuasive detail: single-strain effects have a habit of evaporating.

The mechanism claim

Rather than acting as building material, the peptides appeared to reprogram the wound environment. Treated mouse wounds showed reduced expression of reactive-oxygen genes and increased Arg1, lower TNF-alpha and IL-1beta, and higher IL-10 and TGF-beta. In human monocyte and fibroblast co-culture, lipoxin A4, a pro-resolving lipid mediator, rose from 438.3 to 1950.0 pg/mL.

Human tissue, barely

Wounded human skin explants from abdominal surgery closed faster with treatment in donors both below and above BMI 30, with the stronger effect in the lower-BMI group. Each group contained three donors. That is a signal, not a cohort.

Limitations

The mouse work used one fixed dose in drinking water with no sample-size calculation. The explant cohorts were three donors per BMI group, and the in vitro results rely on a keratinocyte cell line and donor-derived cells under laboratory conditions.

Bottom line

The authors position fish collagen peptides as a promising complementary approach for impaired cutaneous repair. Whether any of it holds in people with diabetic foot ulcers is the study nobody has run yet.