Burns and chronic wounds require urgent, life-saving skin cover to improve the healing outcome and the patient’s future quality of life. We are working on a practical solution to develop a second-generation artificial skin biomaterial to provide this vital cover.

The challenge

When a burn or a chronic wound destroys the full thickness of the skin, the body can never regenerate this lost tissue. Traditionally, surgical intervention involves grafting skin from other parts of the body to treat the burn or wound. Yet in many cases, burns may be so extensive that there is not enough undamaged skin for surgeons to carry out conventional skin grafting. For some patients, conventional grafts involve a high risk by creating a new wound site elsewhere on the body that cannot heal completely. This is most problematic in elderly patients with pressure sores and people with diabetic or other chronic ulcers.

Tissue engineering

One approach offering real potential for success is to try to grow the patient's skin in a laboratory. Medical scientists can now use so-called 'tissue engineering' techniques to grow the top layer of skin, the epidermis, from a biopsy of skin just the size of a postage stamp. From this, they can grow enough epidermis in the laboratory to cover the entire body within a few weeks. However, it is far more challenging to use tissue engineering to grow the underlying layer of skin, the dermis, in the laboratory. Moreover, without the dermis, there is no way for optimum healing and repair to take place.

Our work

RAFT's Group Leader Dr Julian Dye is working with his team to develop an artificial skin material that will not only treat the wound in the short-term but also allow more extensive wounds to be treated than ever before.

Julian and his team's approach will maximise the body's innate healing potential. They have produced a prototype skin 'scaffold' that when placed on the wound, allows a functioning network of blood vessels to grow within it very rapidly, thus reconstructing the dermis.

This will address a major clinical disadvantage of previous types of skin scaffold, by increasing the chances of a graft "taking" before infection has a chance to set in and cause the material to fail. Moreover, it leads to the growth of the essential dermis layer; and may encourage healing without causing excessive scar tissue to form. Ultimately, this second-generation artificial dermis aims to support skin grafting to allow surgeons to reconstruct a more normal skin structure.

Next stages

The team is now performing rigorous testing in preparation for the next stage of development, setting up to manufacture under the standards required to perform a clinical trial. They are also working out how it might be best used to solve clinical challenges.

Case study
Rewarding research
“I found out about RAFT through talking with my senior colleagues about their previous experiences. As a surgical trainee, wound healing is of great interest to me. I also have a specific interest in burn injury since spending time at a Burns Unit as a medical student. So, when the artificial skin project advertised for a surgical research fellow, I took this opportunity to apply. 
 
I’m able to use my surgical training to assist the project and I have learnt a huge amount about the scientific techniques used for the Smart Matrix project. I find it so rewarding and challenging to work as part of the team and have enjoyed presenting our work at major scientific and surgical conferences, which generate further ideas for important exploration and development.”

Sophie Dann,
Surgical Research Fellow