A New Source of Skin for Grafts?

There are many conditions that may require skin grafts, including burns, infections, wounds and cancer. The gold standard is to harvest skin from another part of the patient’s body, which isn’t always possible, especially in the case of extensive burns. This study explored the possibility of “stretching” skin in the laboratory to create large amounts of skin for reconstruction.

This is believed to be the first report of a computer-controlled bioreactor system being used to generate living issue in the lab. We used human foreskin, which is known to be more elastic than tissue in other parts of the body. The tissue was expanded incrementally in a computer-controlled system over six days to increase its surface area by approximately 100 percent while maintaining the structural integrity. The expanded skin contained viable and proliferating cells.

This technique could allow a surgeon to take a small skin biopsy and expand it in the lab, creating a large segment for use in reconstructive procedures. It could potentially replace current options, such as artificial skin, which does not contain living cells, and the use of tissue expanders, which are balloon-like devices that are implanted in the body to create tissue flaps. Disadvantages of the expanders include pain, infection and long waiting times.

Because the stretched skin contains living cells, it would potentially contribute to healing, much the way a skin graft does.

(Bioreactor Maintained Living Skin Matrix. Ladd MR, Lee SJ, Atala A, Yoo JJ. Tissue Eng Part A. 2008 Sep 26. [Epub ahead of print])