Banking on Cultured Skin Cells and Tissue Engineering
- the future of burn wound
treatment
Zhe Li* and
Skin Culture Laboratory*, NSW State-Wide Severe Burns Injury
Services
Effective wound coverage and skin grafting in burns patients are critical for controlling infection, stopping body fluid loss and promoting wound healing. However, the dilemma in treating patients with extensive burn wounds is usually the lack of good donor sites for enough autologous skin grafts. Although allogeneic skin from cadaver donor or even xerogeneic grafts have been used in treating burns patients, their applications are only as an alternative for temporary wound coverage or wound bed preparation because of their immunological incompatibility. All these issues prompted the researches in order to find a better solution for burn wound treatment. Recent development in tissue culture, cell biology and molecular biology and tissue engineering technologies is changing the traditional strategies in treating burn wound. Cultured autologous skin cells and tissue-engineered skin equivalents are now widely used for treating burn wounds. Under laboratory condition, autologous skin cells can be isolated from a skin biopsy of very small size, expanded and grown into transplantable skin products using cellular and tissue engineering technology. The advantage of autologous cultured skin cells in treating burns wound is obvious because of the tissue compatibility, small and easy-to-care donor site and biological safety. It has been demonstrated as an extremely useful alternative for patients with limited donor site although improvement is still needed for better clinical outcome. In this talk, progresses in the researches and clinical potentials of cultured skin cells, tissue engineering and skin equivalents will be discussed.