A new type of bioprinted skin could revolutionize how we replace human skin going forward. The new skin was made by combining the six primary skin cell types with additional hydrogels, allowing them to create thick and multilayered skin. When transplanted successfully, the skin can heal wounds faster and with far less scarring.
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Having a breakthrough like this could make skin grafts and transplants much more reliable and easier to blend in. That’s because faster healing means less time the patient has to spend nursing the printed skin back to health, and less scarring means less evidence of the transplant in the first place.
Previously, researchers have created living tissue for robots ,. This breakthrough proves that bioengineered human skin can be applied in full thickness and promotes faster healing.
When testing the skin, researchers transplanted it onto mice wounds and found that the printed skin formed skin patterns, blood vessels, and even showed normal tissue development. This all allowed the wound to heal faster with less skin contraction, the researchers note in their new paper.
The full details of the new bioprinted skin were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, and it presents a huge breakthrough for the skin transplant industry, especially if these claims of faster healing times and less scaring can be scaled up to work on humans, too. The only animal-based tests that we can use for now are the ones done on mice.
But if the human trials are successful, it could be a new way to handle skin transplants, which would make them more likely for them to heal naturally and succeed. Even if the trials require some finesse to get things 100 percent right, this breakthrough at least shows that it is possible to create a full-thickness skin like this.
The post This bioprinted skin can heal wounds faster with less scarring appeared first on BGR.
