"When treating severe burns and trauma, skin regeneration can be a matter of life or death. Extensive burns are usually treated by transplanting a thin layer of epidermis, the top layer of skin, from elsewhere on the body. However, this method not only leaves large scars, it also does not restore the skin to its original functional state. Unless the dermis, the layer below the epidermis, which contains blood vessels and nerves, is regenerated, it cannot be considered normal living skin."
"Now, work by Swedish researchers may have brought medicine closer to being able to regenerate living skin. They have developed two types of 3D bioprinting techniques to artificially generate thick skin that is vascularized, meaning it contains blood vessels. One technique produces skin that is packed with cells, and the other produces arbitrarily shaped blood vessels in the tissue. The two technologies take different approaches to the same challenge."
""The dermis is so complicated that we can't grow it in a lab. We don't even know what all its components are," said Johan Junker, an associate professor at Linkoping University and specialist in plastic surgery who lead this work, in a statement. "That's why we, and many others, think that we could possibly transplant the building blocks and then let the body make the dermis itself.""
Extensive burns are commonly treated with epidermal transplants that leave scars and fail to restore dermal functions such as blood vessels and nerves. Two 3D bioprinting approaches create thick, vascularized skin: one builds tissue packed with high cell density and the other fabricates arbitrarily shaped blood-vessel channels. A specialized bio-ink, μInk, cultures fibroblasts on spongy gelatin grains encased in a hyaluronic acid gel to produce printable, cell-rich material. A transplantation experiment in mice confirmed that living cells grew inside tissue fragments, supporting the strategy of transplanting building blocks and letting the body rebuild the dermis.
Read at WIRED
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