Almost 11 million people go through severe burns that heal
slowly and cause deep wounds and lifelong scars. During surgery for grafting of
functional full-thickness skin to reduce the scarring, only a very limited area
of skin can be removed from the individual patient, since it can create new
wounds. Apart from conventional skin grafting, a skin graft can also be
engineered in the lab which firstly is composed of the patient's cells and
secondly is very similar to natural human skin.
Rsearchers at the
University Children's Hospital Zurich and the University of Zurich have
engineered skin cells for the very first time containing blood and lymphatic
capillaries. They have managed to isolate all the necessary types of skin cells
from human skin tissue and engineering a skin graft that is similar to
full-thickness skin.
Conventional complex skin grafts do not have any blood or
lymphatic capillaries, pigmentation, sebaceous glands, hair follicles or
nerves. The researchers have been engineering dermo-epidermal skin grafts for
some time, but now, they have succeeded in constructing a more complex organ.
This development has given a several
times booze to Regenerative medicine and molecular tissue biology. Wound healing can be hampered by a Tissue
Fluid that is secreted by the wound and accumulates in a cavity on skin’s
surface. The researchers managed
to isolated lymphatic capillary cells from the human dermis. Together with the
blood capillaries, that were also engineered, this guarantees rapid, efficient
vesicular supply of the skin graft. This lead to three major findings:
