Artificial skin

Abstract

The generation of artificial skin substitutes grew out of the bioengineering tradition at about the same time as the in vitro culture of keratinocytes was established by cell biologists. Artificial skin came to include products used for the clinical treatment of acute and chronic wounds as well as laboratory models for the study of the basic biology of the skin. These systems were well established at the start of the millennium and have seen growing acceptance and further exploration of new applications since then. Integra, an early dermal template used for the treatment of burns has expanded into many other surgical fields. Allogeneic cellular therapeutic products, such as Apligraf and Dermagraft have been accepted for the treatment of chronic wounds without problems of immunological rejection. A major application for the laboratory organotypic skin systems is in the testing of household chemicals, where the methods are gaining acceptance over the traditional Draize test, thus eliminating much use of animals. Several commercial products are available for this purpose, but face the business-related problems. Organotypic skin cultures have reached every aspect of skin biology, being used for wound healing studies, models of genetic disease and cancer. It has also proven possible recently to reconstitute both murine as well as human skin from dissociated cells.