Tissue-engineered skin substitutes

Abstract

The last two years have seen new tissue-engineered skin substitutes come onto the market and begin to resolve the various roles to which each is best suited. It is becoming evident that some of the very expensive cell-based products have cost-benefit advantage despite their high price and are valuable within the restricted applications for which they are intended. The use of skin substitutes for testing purposes has extended from epidermal keratinocytes to other integumentary epithelia and into preparations containing multiple cell types in which reactions resulting from paracrine interactions can be examined. Challenges remain in the application of gene therapy techniques to skin substitutes, both the control of transgene expression and in the selection of suitable genes to transfect. A coming challenge is the production of tissue-engineered products without the use of animal products other than human cells. A challenge that may be diminishing is the importance of acute rejection of allogeneic tissue-engineered skin substitutes.

Biodegradable Polysaccharide Gels for Skin Scaffolds

“…Also, artificial skin often contains animal material, such as collagen, which may contain infectious material. Due to these problems, there is a need for improved methods and materials for fabricating artificial skin [9,10]. Unfortunately, there are limited biocompatible and biodegradable materials available.…”

An in vitro Model System to Study the Damaging Effects of Prolonged Mechanical Loading of the Epidermis

“…29,35 In general, these engineered epidermal equivalents consist of normal, human-derived keratinocytes, which have been cultured on porous, flexible membranes of cell culture inserts at the air-liquid interface to form a multilayered, highly differentiated model of the human epidermis. 37 The stratum corneum, the protective skin barrier, has also been demonstrated in these engineered epidermal equivalents.…”

Efficacy of supermacroporous poly(ethylene glycol)–gelatin cryogel matrix for soft tissue engineering applications

“…Above limitations in all areas can be answered by employing the concepts of tissue engineering which aims to achieve three dimensional scaffolds for the repair of traumatic injuries of peripheral and central nervous systems, re-establish the structure and function of injured myocardium and skin. Various polymeric scaffolds have been used for nerve regeneration approaches, cardiac and skin tissue engineering which include natural polymers, synthetic non-degradable polymers, synthetic biodegradable polymers and conducting polymers [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38].…”