Turning the ocean’s overlooked by-product into medicine

Havdis, a Norwegian and Icelandic startup, is extracting a wound healing bioactive from Atlantic cod milt, an underutilised fishery by-product.

Huge amounts of the fish the world catches are never put to use. The 2024 World Economic Forum white paper Investigating Global Aquatic Food Loss and Waste found that around 23.8 million tonnes of edible aquatic food, close to 15 percent of everything produced, was lost or wasted in 2021. Waste at this level carries an environmental cost and represents a significant loss of potential value.

Yet these by-products are far from worthless. With the right processing they can be turned into high value compounds for medicine and skincare, and companies around the world are increasingly building businesses on exactly that potential.

Established in Bergen in June 2025, Havdis is a Norwegian and Icelandic marine biotechnology company with the mission, to create value from the underused parts of the fish. It follows the 100% Fish movement pioneered by the Iceland Ocean Cluster, using every part of the catch rather than only the fillet, and applies a zero waste model that turns fisheries into sustainable value chains built on fish derived innovations.

With its Icelandic roots, Havdis carries that thinking to one of the least used parts of all, the milt, the sperm and seminal fluid of the sexually mature male fish, also known as soft roe. From it the company extracts a bioactive ingredient called PDRN, short for polydeoxyribonucleotide.

PDRN has been used in medicine for years as a tissue repair agent and studied for the healing of chronic wounds including diabetic foot ulcers. More recently it has become a widely used ingredient in aesthetic skin treatments, particularly in South Korea, for skin repair and post procedure recovery.

PDRN is a mixture of short DNA fragments, and it works in two ways at once. The fragments are broken down into nucleotides that cells reuse as ready made building blocks to repair and rebuild tissue, a process known as the salvage pathway. At the same time the fragments activate the adenosine A2A receptor on the surface of skin and repair cells, which switches on collagen production, encourages new cells and blood vessels to form and calms inflammation. It is this double action, supplying raw material and sending a repair signal, that gives PDRN its effect.

Havdis is building a scalable solution to a global challenge, the treatment of diabetic wounds. In Europe alone, for instance, as many as one in four people with diabetes will face a foot ulcer in their lifetime, and by reasonable estimates between one and a half and two million people across the region are living with one at any time. These wounds are slow to heal and prone to return, and in the worst cases they lead to amputation. In a randomised controlled trial, injected PDRN roughly doubled the rate of complete healing of hard to heal diabetic foot ulcers compared with placebo, with 37 percent of patients fully healed against 19 percent on placebo after eight weeks (Squadrito et al., Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2014).

Havdis extracts its PDRN from Atlantic cod milt, a by-product available at scale from Nordic fisheries. Producing it in Norway gives a traceable European source, with a clear line from the boat to the buyer and value returning to the coastal communities that land the fish.

Havdis’s first product is cosmetic grade PDRN, and demand for marine ingredients is rising fast. Its ambition reaches further. The north star for Havdis is to bring its own medical device to market, made from Atlantic cod milt, to treat the ulcer wounds that so often follow diabetes.

It is circular thinking taken to its natural conclusion. A part of the cod that once went unused could one day help heal the wounds that cost people their limbs, while returning value to the communities that bring the fish ashore. That is the future Havdis is building, one where nothing from the fish is wasted.

www.havdis.no