The Children’s Hospital in Zurich recently announced that researchers have succeeded in growing skin in the laboratory that contains lymphatic and blood vessels. In the future, replacement skin could thus fulfill the functions of natural human skin more and more effectively.
In order to be able to successfully replace burned or scalded skin with artificially produced skin, this must contain as closely as possible the structures that the injured skin had. The research team “Tissue Biology Research Unit” at the Children’s Hospital Zurich has now succeeded in isolating all the necessary skin cells from human skin tissue, initially in the laboratory. This makes it possible to create a skin substitute that is similar to full-thickness skin.
Lymphatic and blood vessels
What the skin substitutes lacked until now were blood and lymph vessels, pigmentation, sweat glands or hair follicles and nerves. While a skin substitute consisting of epidermis and subcutis has been possible for some time, the research team has now been able to grow a more complex organ that forms a full-skin-like substitute with blood and lymph vessels by isolating all the necessary skin cells from a human skin sample. These blood and lymphatic capillaries, developed for the first time, guarantee efficient and rapid vascularization of the skin substitute, which represents a major advance in molecular tissue biology and regenerative medicine and improves healing.
For the research team, the following three points were particularly surprising:
- The harvested lymphatic vessel cells spontaneously arranged in the laboratory to form lymphatic capillaries that possessed all the crucial characteristics.
- Both the engineered human blood and lymphatic capillaries connected with those of the test animals in preclinical experiments.
- The lymphatic vessels were functional.
However, complex skin substitutes, including those without blood and lymphatic vessels, have yet to be approved.
Source: Media release Children’s Hospital Zurich, January 30, 2014, Zurich
- Daniela Marino, et al: Bioengineering Dermo-Epidermal Skin Grafts with Blood and Lymphatic Capillaries. Science Translational Medicine. January 29, 2014. DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3006894
DERMATOLOGIE PRAXIS 2014; 24(1): 29
