ARTIFICIALLY cultured skin grown in large ready-to-use patches may soon be used to improve significantly the treatment of burns victims and, potentially, save lives.
A team of British doctors and scientists is growing full-thickness skin in laboratory dishes and has already used a small, five-centimetre patch on one patient.
In severe burns cases, surgeons often face the difficulty that there is not enough undamaged skin to take from a patient and graft on to the burnt area.
Using laboratory-produced thick skin should lead to better graft results because the test-tube material would be less likely to wrinkle and contract than the much thinner surface skin used by plastic surgeons at present. It would also be less prone to infection.
The five-strong British team, led by consultant plastic surgeon Eric Freedlander and Dr Sheila MacNeil of Northern General Hospital in Sheffield, has already grown surface skin in the laboratory and successfully treated 13 patients.
They each had a sample of their own skin taken on admission. From that sample, cells were taken and cultured in a special liquid. Patients' burns were then resurfaced using donor skin taken from a relative or from storage.
Two or three weeks later, the patient returned to the operating theatre and the donor skin, which begins to die after three weeks, was shaved off and replaced with the cultured skin grown from their own cells.
