Every year, poorly healing wounds cost around $250 billion, which indicates the urgent need for new solutions and prioritization of wound care. When Mexico and the UAE approved a medical device capable of healing chronic wounds, Jasen Petersen, co-founder and CEO of Ionic Alliance Foundation, Inc. (IAF), believes its significance went beyond a new treatment hitting the market.
Termed Ion Biotechnology Aqueous Ligands (IBAL), a class of therapeutic technology designed as a microimmune restorative, Petersen notes it operates via a physical-chemical mechanism, deliberately distinct from pharmacologic, metabolic, or immunologic actions. This distinction, he believes, is embedded in a philosophy aimed at fundamentally changing who can afford healing by redefining regulatory pathways and accessibility.
Petersen challenges the current state of wound care, insinuating that it often brings a heap of counterproductive techniques that could pave the way for greater treatment costs. In his opinion, it forces intervention that fights cellular biology rather than supporting the body”s natural healing process. According to him, the use of antimicrobials to eliminate pathogens could erode the surrounding healthy terrain, creating cellular trauma and poor-quality tissue to minimize scarring. This, he notes, could result in a cycle of interventions that disrupts the natural healing sequence, leaving little room for true biological resolution.
Jasen Peterson (provided)
The IBAL formulation, Petersen believes, approaches wound care through a natural approach. In his view, this methodology emphasizes working with cellular biology through a sequence of supportive actions. He notes that it first attempts to eliminate pathogens using agents that are not a threat to the cells themselves. This action, combined with its effort to restore the microimmune terrain and redox balance, could allow cells to naturally transition through their proper healing sequence. Instead of a forced intervention, Petersen thinks that pathogen clearance could become a feasible outcome through a restored ecosystem. “Our focus is on bringing one intervention that works with cellular biology to expedite wound healing so we can reduce the number of forceful interventions that could delay the process,” he explains. Petersen also notes that IAF creates the fundamental, formulaic base, which other companies can then use to develop and brand their own specific products.
From an economic standpoint, Petersen believes Mexico’s regulatory nod is seismic. He notes that the device’s mechanism qualifies it as a medical device rather than a drug, which could support cost reduction and development time.
“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.
