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Improving Artificial Skin
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Business New Haven
1/5/2004
By: BNH
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NEW HAVEN - Yale researchers have developed a new technique for producing artificial skin that is likely to improve the reliability of overall skin graft performance, especially in recipients with impaired blood vessel development, such as diabetics and the elderly. The work was published in last month's issue of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal (FASEB). The Yale team also recently won a Roche Organ Transplantation Research Foundation grant that supports cutting-edge organ transplantation research worldwide. Jeffrey Schechner, M.D., is principal investigator on the study and the grant.
Working with mice, Schechner, assistant professor of dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine, and his team reported that human skin can be developed with blood vessels derived from cultured endothelial cells. Skin engineered without blood vessels has been available for several years and is used to treat burns, trauma wounds, surgical excisions, non-healing ulcers and blistering diseases. These products improve wound healing, but long-term success of engineered skin grafts has failed and is likely due to inadequate delivery of oxygen and nutrients in the post-transplantation period.
"To address this problem we have developed a method of including endothelial cells, the cells that line blood vessels, to promote vascularization and perfusion of human skin equivalents in vivo," said Schechner. "The scaffold on which these skin equivalents were built is acellular dermis, which is currently used as a temporary coverage of wounds. This is skin in which all cellular constituents are eliminated leaving only a matrix that retains many critical mechanical and supportive properties."
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