Artificial skin

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Artificial skin refers to skin grown in a laboratory that can be used as skin replacement for people who have suffered severe burns or skin diseases.

[edit] Overview

The skin is the largest organ in the human body. Severe damage to large areas of skin exposes the human organism to dehydration and infections that can result in death.

Traditional ways of dealing with large losses of skin have been to use skin from other parts of a patient's body (such as thighs) or from a different person/cadaver. The former approach has the disadvantage that there may not be enough skin available, while the latter suffers from the possibility of rejection or infection.

Recently there has been progress towards creating artificial skin. Typically, a collagen scaffold is used (the protein that underlies the structure of skin), which can be additionally seeded with patient's own cells,^{[1][2] [3]} or with foreskin from newborns that was removed during circumcision.^[4]

The Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology is working towards a fully automated process for producing artificial skin. Their goal for the moment is a simple two-layer skin without blood vessels that can be used to study how skin interacts with consumer products, such as creams, medicines, etc. Eventually they hope to produce more complex skin, that can be used in transplants.^[5]

[edit] References