Transferable crosslinked chitosan membranes for human melanocyte culture

Abstract

Development of transferable biocompatible membranes, which can be used for melanocyte culture and transplantation, is considered a feasible approach to increase the success rate for vitiliginous treatment. In this study, a crosslinked chitosan membrane (CCM) was produced via physical crosslinking of chitosan with sodium sulfate. The physical and mechanical properties as well as growth and phenotype expression of melanocytes on the CCM were investigated. The CCM supported growth and proliferation of melanocytes with the existence of melanin granules in the cytoplasm. The melanocytes remained active after transplantation. The CCM absorbed water approximately doubled from its original weight and permitted ∼2400 g/m² per day of water vapor transmission, suggesting that the CCM can function as an efficient wound dressing. Dynamic mechanical and tensile measurement results showed that the CCM possessed favorable wet strength for cell culture, separation, transfer, and transplantation application. This transferable CCM has the potential to be applied for vitiligo treatment.

Review of current clinical studies of vitiligo treatments

“…No difference in repigmentation was observed for up to 1 : 60 ratio, making cultured melanocyte transplantation suitable for treatment of large lesions resistant to other nonsurgical therapeutics . Two papers aimed to improve cultured melanocyte transplantation through the development of membrane scaffolds for culture setup and subsequent transplantation . In particular, pilot trail of amniotic membrane revealed 90–95% success rate in all four patients enrolled warranting further investigation and development of this technique.…”

“…Despite domination of studies aiming to evaluate already used in clinical practice treatments, several advantages has been made in the field, with the need of their future investigation in a large scale to ultimately prove suitability, efficiency, and safety. Those include development of supports for melanocyte culture to be applied in transplantation procedures , improved methodology of suction blister graft generation , and simplified procedure for epidermal cell suspension transfer . In addition, two methods of delivering hair‐derived melanocyte reservoirs to depigmented skin were suggested, one consisting in hair transplantation , and the other being more sophisticated but having less limitations and consisting in extracting follicle outer root sheath cell for transplantation , which might represent a potential significant advance in the field in the future.…”

“…Papers on application of surgical procedures to treat vitiligo and/or their improvement dominated over investigation of other treatment modalities, counting for nearly a half (38 of 78) papers published in a field of clinical vitiligo management since January 2010 until May 2012. The reports could be stratified as focused on continuing evaluation of efficiency of various surgical methods per se (5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18), including retrospective studies of large patient cohorts (13,18), improvement of existing treatments through advancement in methodology (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25), or by combining with other nonsurgical treatments (26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33), development and evaluation of novel surgical techniques in vitiligo treatment (34)(35)(36)(37), and extending treatments on a novel patient groups (38)(39)(40)(41), mostly children and adolescents (38)(39)(40).…”