Nanotechnology and Skin Grafts

A Revolutionary Approach to Tissue Engineering

Last week the majority of the articles we posted dealt with how
skin grafts work and the different options of skin graft therapy
available to the patient. However, this process takes months and
years to heal and get the patient up to a functional state. So I
investigated methods in which the process can be expedited. Are there
any ways to speed the process? This week I focused on treatment of
severe burns using a combination of different fields. This article,
written in October 29th in 2009 deals with the use of nanotechnology
in order to accelerate the healing of skin grafts and burn wounds.
This is an excerpt from the article:

"The repair and management of extensive burn wounds have long
been a problem and served as a difficulty in conventional Tissue
Engineering methods. Autografts are often used in burn treatment;
however, insufficient supply and the secondary wounds created from
harvesting autografts limit its applicability for extensive burns.
Autologous tissue engineered skin substitutes (ATESS) are considered a
promising alternative to autografts. They possess many of the
properties of an autograft, such as wound protection, accelerated
wound closure, high graft take, new skin regeneration, and not subject
to immunorejection. For extensive burn treatment using ATESS, there
are two unsolved and critical issues: 1) the in vitro time to create
the skin substitutes should be as short as possible, allowing rapid
wound closure; 2) the size of ATESS should be as large as possible to
cover enough wounded area. Current tissue-engineering approaches
require prolonged culture time and cannot produce large skin
substitutes. Therefore, it is desirable to develop new approaches and
strategies toward rapid production of autologous skin substitutes with
up-scaling potential. The primary objective of our research is to
develop a novel practical protocol for rapid creation of ATESS using a
nanofiber-enabled layer-by-layer cell assembly approach. Our specific
aims are: 1) in vitro preparation and characterization of skin
substitutes using layer-by-layer assembly of skin cells, 2) in vivo
determination of the effect of tissue engineered skin substitutes on
the healing of acute full-thickness wounds in a mouse model."

Of course, this is a new frontier in skin graft treatment, but
the prospect of using nano- scaffolds to speed the grafting of skin to
the wound is more than hopeful, it is tangible.