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10 surprising uses of insects in medicine

Maggots that clean wounds, moth cells that grow vaccines and a beetle compound now approved for a childhood skin infection. Here is what the evidence says about each, and what it means at the bedside.

Updated

Insects turn up in modern medicine more often than most patients would guess. Some uses are centuries old and have been put through clinical trials. Others are recent laboratory tools or regulatory approvals. A few are still promising ideas. This guide sorts them by how strong the evidence is and points out what matters for nurses who may meet them on the ward.

1. Maggots that debride wounds

Sterile larvae of the green bottle fly, Lucilia sericata, are placed on a wound under a dressing that keeps them in. They liquefy and eat dead tissue while leaving healthy tissue alone, and they reduce the number of bacteria in the wound.1 The US Food and Drug Administration cleared medical maggots as a device in January 2004.2 In December 2024 oversight moved to the FDA’s biologics center, together with medicinal leeches.3

The cleared labeling covers non-healing wounds with dead tissue, including pressure ulcers, venous stasis ulcers, neuropathic foot ulcers and wounds after trauma or surgery. A typical treatment applies 5 to 8 larvae per square centimeter for a 48-hour cycle (24 to 72 hours), one to three cycles a week, and most wounds need two to six cycles. Larvae should be used within 24 hours of arrival.3

The evidence is clear on cleaning and less clear on healing. A 2025 meta-analysis of 10 randomized trials with 839 patients found that maggots finished debridement much faster than conventional methods, but the share of wounds that fully healed was not significantly different.4

2. Honey dressings

Honey is made by honeybees, and its use on wounds is ancient. Modern dressings use medical-grade honey made for wound care, not the jar from the kitchen. Honey works in three ways: its high sugar content draws fluid out of the wound, it is acidic, and it kills bacteria. In most honeys the antibacterial effect comes from hydrogen peroxide. In manuka honey it comes from methylglyoxal, which keeps working in the wound.5 The first FDA clearance for a honey wound dressing came in July 2007.6

A Cochrane review of 26 trials with 3,011 participants found high-quality evidence that honey heals partial-thickness burns about four and a half days faster than conventional dressings. For most other wound types the evidence was low or very low quality.7

3. Vaccines grown in moth cells

Some vaccines are made inside insect cells. Scientists insert the gene for a viral protein into a baculovirus, a virus that infects insects, and use it to infect a line of cultured cells. The cells then produce the viral protein, which becomes the vaccine’s active ingredient.

  • Flublok, a flu vaccine first approved in the US in 2013, is made in a cell line derived from the fall armyworm moth, Spodoptera frugiperda. Its 2026–2027 formula is approved for people 9 years and older.8
  • Nuvaxovid, Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine, is made in the same moth cell line and received full FDA approval in May 2025 for adults 65 and older and for people aged 12 to 64 with at least one underlying condition.9
  • Cervarix, an HPV vaccine approved in 2009, was made in cells from the cabbage looper moth, Trichoplusia ni.10 Its maker stopped supplying it in the US in 2016 because of low demand.11

Because Flublok is grown in insect cells rather than in chicken eggs, it is one option for people who need or prefer a flu vaccine made without eggs.

4. A blister beetle compound for molluscum

Cantharidin is a blistering compound first known from blister beetles.12 In July 2023 the FDA approved a cantharidin solution, Ycanth, as the first treatment for molluscum contagiosum, a common viral skin infection in children. It is approved for patients aged 2 and older.13

Ycanth is applied only by health care providers, once to each lesion and repeated every three weeks as needed. Patients or parents wash it off with soap and water 24 hours later. Nurses should know two label warnings: it can cause life-threatening or fatal toxicity if swallowed, and it is flammable, even after it dries.14

5. Venom immunotherapy for sting allergy

Bee and wasp stings cause severe allergic reactions in up to 7.5% of adults and up to 3.4% of children. For people at risk, venom immunotherapy is the only treatment that prevents future severe reactions.15 Patients receive gradually increasing doses of purified venom until their immune system tolerates it. Complete protection is reported in 77–84% of people allergic to honeybees and 91–96% of people allergic to wasps and other vespids.16 Most patients can stop after five years of treatment.17

Do not confuse this with “bee venom therapy” or bee-venom acupuncture, which is promoted for arthritis and pain. Trials of it are few and small,18 and it carries a measurable risk of anaphylaxis.19 Melittin, the main peptide in bee venom, is studied in the lab for cancer and infections, but it destroys red blood cells, which has kept it out of the clinic.20

6. Firefly light that checks cleaning

The enzyme that makes fireflies glow, luciferase, produces light when it reacts with ATP, a molecule found in every living cell and in most organic residue. ATP hygiene tests use this reaction: a swab from a surface goes into a reader, and the amount of light shows how much residue was left behind.21 Hospitals use these tests to give staff instant feedback on cleaning in intensive care units, endoscopy suites and operating rooms.22 In one endoscope-reprocessing protocol, manual cleaning was repeated whenever the reading after cleaning exceeded 200 relative light units.23

The test has a limit nurses should keep in mind: it cannot tell microbes from other organic residue, so it supports cleaning checks rather than replacing them.22 In research, the same firefly enzyme lets scientists track tumors and infections inside living animals.24

7. Silk sutures

Silk is spun by the domesticated silkworm, Bombyx mori, and silk sutures are still a recognized medical device in the US, used to bring soft tissue together.25 Researchers have published thousands of studies on silk protein (fibroin) for tissue engineering, but outside sutures few silk products have reached routine clinical use.26

Insects closed wounds long before silk thread did. Ancient Indian surgical texts describe using the jaws of large ants as wound clips, a practice reported in some places into the early 1900s.27

8. Insect products in your pills

Two common ingredients in medicines come from insects:

  • Shellac, a resin secreted by the female lac insect, Kerria lacca, is one of the oldest coatings used on tablets. It dissolves poorly in stomach acid, which made it an early enteric coating.28 The “pharmaceutical glaze” listed on many tablets is a shellac solution.29
  • Carmine and cochineal extract, red dyes made from the cochineal scale insect, Dactylopius coccus, are permitted for coloring medicines.30 They can cause severe allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, in some people. Since 2011 US food and cosmetic labels must name them; that rule does not cover medicines.31

For patients with an allergy to these dyes, or who avoid animal products, check the inactive ingredients on the Drug Facts label of over-the-counter medicines, and ask the pharmacist about prescriptions.

9. Antimicrobial peptides against resistant bacteria

Insects have no antibodies, yet they fight off infections well. In 1981 Hans Boman’s group in Sweden isolated a family of small antibacterial proteins from the pupae of the cecropia moth and named them cecropins.32 Insects make hundreds of such antimicrobial peptides, and researchers study them as possible weapons against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.33 None has yet become an approved medicine, so this remains a research story.

10. Fruit flies behind five Nobel Prizes

The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is not a treatment, but much of modern medicine rests on it. Up to 75% of human genes linked to disease have a counterpart in the fly.34 Research on fruit flies earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine five times:

  • 1933: Thomas Hunt Morgan, for showing how chromosomes carry inherited traits.35
  • 1946: Hermann Muller, for showing that X-rays cause mutations.36
  • 1995: Edward Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus, for the genes that shape the early embryo.37
  • 2011: Jules Hoffmann, shared with two other scientists, for discovering how flies sense infection, which opened up the study of innate immunity.38
  • 2017: Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young, for the genes that run the body’s daily clock.39

What about leeches?

Medicinal leeches are often listed alongside maggots, and the FDA now regulates the two together, but leeches are segmented worms, not insects. They belong in a different list.

Sources

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  10. Cervarix prescribing information, initial US approval 2009. fda.gov ↩

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  39. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2017, press release. nobelprize.org ↩