Acute Care Alberta is leveraging top wound care products and technologies to treat the 21 soldiers who remain hospitalized in Alberta following the CFB Wainwright grass fire on October 17, 2026, including AVITA Medical’s (NASDAQ: RCEL, ASX: AVH) RECELL System, a device that prepares a sprayable suspension of a patient’s own skin cells in approximately 30 minutes.
Although RECELL received FDA approval in 2018, it is not licensed in Canada. According to a recent CBC news article, Health Canada facilitated access to the device through its Medical Devices Special Access Program.
In an interview with CBC from Kansas City, Dr. Julia Slater, medical director for the Burnett Burn Center at the University of Kansas Health System, explained that burn centers responding to mass casualty incidents may not have sufficient donor skin available to treat patients with extensive burns. RECELL allows surgeons to use a small graft to prepare a cell suspension that can be applied over a much larger wound surface area. The suspension can be prepared in the operating room in roughly 30 minutes, compared to the weeks required to produce lab-grown skin.
According to AVITA, company staff travelled to burn centers in Calgary and Edmonton to support surgeons using the device for the first time.
In a November 5, 2026 press release, AVITA announced that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has finalized national physician valuations for skin cell suspension autograft procedures performed using RECELL under the 2027 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, effective January 1, 2027.
The new payment framework establishes nationally consistent payment valuations, replacing regionally determined rates, and simplifies billing by reducing the number of applicable Current Procedural Terminology codes from eight to four. The changes are expected to provide greater reimbursement predictability for physicians performing RECELL procedures and support broader adoption in the U.S.
Cary Vance, president and CEO of AVITA, commented, “Clinicians should be able to focus on helping patients heal, with clear expectations around physician payment. These changes bring simpler billing and greater payment predictability to physicians using RECELL. For AVITA, they strengthen the foundation for broader adoption as we continue to make RECELL a standard of care for patients with burn and wound injuries.”
