It turns out that the mechanism that maggots use to reduce inflammatory stress response in hosts of which they're making parasitic use can be isolated and used to reduce inflammatory response to injury.
"The complement system [of proteins] plays an important role in the activation of the inflammatory response to injury, although inappropriate complement activation (CA) can lead to severe tissue damage. Maggot therapy is successfully used to treat infected wounds," researcher Gwendolyn Cazander MD, PhD of the Department of Immunology, Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands writes in the study's abstract, published 30 October 2012.
Continued from the abstract: "In this study, we hypothesized that maggot excretions/secretions influence CA in order to modulate the host's inflammatory response. [T]he effect of maggot excretions on CA was investigated in preoperatively and postoperatively obtained sera [amber-colored, protein-rich liquid that separates out when blood coagulates] from patients. Our results show that maggot excretions reduce CA in healthy and postoperatively immune-activated human sera up to 99.9%, via all pathways. Maggot excretions do not specifically initiate or inhibit CA, but break down complement proteins [...] in a cation-independent manner and this effect proves to be temperature tolerant. This study indicates a CA-reducing substrate that is already successfully used in clinical practice and may explain part of the improved wound healing caused by maggot therapy. Furthermore, the complement activation-reducing substance present in maggot excretions could provide a novel treatment modality for several diseases, resulting from an (over)active complement system."
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