A team of researchers is currently testing a new device that can print artificial "sheets of skin" on burns.
Imagine that a person with severe burns is brought to the hospital. He needs skin grafts right away. A surgeon then arrives, armed with a small portable device. It sits over the area to be treated and quickly "prints" thin sheets of artificial skin onto the wounds.
Thanks to researchers at the University of Toronto, this scenario may soon become reality .
To treat severe burn wounds, doctors usually take a piece of healthy skin from another part of the patient's body and then graft it onto the exposed wounds after removing the tissue damaged. However, this option is not always possible .
Indeed, it can happen that the burns are so severe that the upper layers and lower layers of the skin are completely destroyed. And sometimes there just isn't enough healthy skin to harvest.
There is also an alternative option which is to grow collagen scaffolds. However, it is a very long process that can take several weeks. The ideal would therefore be to be able to replace the destroyed skin with new skin tissue as simply and quickly as possible, while minimizing the risk of infection. This is where the device of our researchers comes into play.
In 2018, a team from the University of Toronto presented a first portable device capable of "printing" sheets of artificial skin directly on burns . This deposited material consists of collagen (the most abundant protein in the dermis) and fibrin, a protein necessary for wound healing.
The first animal tests had shown promise. The researchers now explain that they have conducted other experiments on pigs, once again successful. This is great news and brings us closer to the first clinical trials.
"The device successfully deposited 'sheets of skin' on wounds evenly, safely and reliably, and these sheets then remained in place with a very minimal movement" , said Marc Jeschke, lead author of the study. Most importantly, "our results showed that treated wounds also healed extremely well with reduced inflammation, scarring, and contractions compared to untreated wounds or those treated with a collagen scaffold," he added.
If the device were ever to enter the market, it could revolutionize the treatment of wounds and burns. However, researchers will need to work closely with surgeons to develop a device that effectively meets physicians' needs.
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