Autolog-ish: a novel way to grow skin grafts
Human skin cells injected into mouse embryos from sheets of epidermis that can be used as semi-autologous skin grafts.
Currently, the standard treatment for extensive skin damage (such as burns) is through autologous skin grafts – where the skin is donated from another site on the patient’s body. While this is suitable for replacing small areas of skin, complications can arise when a larger graft area is required. There are limitations to the area of skin that can be taken from the donor site and it is often not possible to transplant all three layers of skin to support normal pigmentation and the formation of sweat glands and hair follicles. This means that graft skin is often not a good cosmetic match for the native skin at the transplant site. Finding novel ways to generate better skin grafts, therefore, represents a major goal in the field of regenerative medicine.
Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (Tokyo, Japan) set out to obtain proof of concept for a new way of generating skin grafts – by growing them in another species. In their initial experiments, they took knockout mouse embryos that did not express the genes necessary for the production of a mature epidermis and injected them with mouse stem cells. After allowing the fetuses to develop normally, the researchers observed that the resultant mice grew large patches of skin originating from the donated cells. These skin patches were then successfully transplanted into adult mice, where they survived for up to three months.
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To further test their novel graft generation method, the researchers implanted more knockout mouse embryos with human skin cells. As the mice developed, they grew patches of skin that structurally imitated mature human epidermis, demonstrating that the technique could indeed be adapted to grow human skin. The researchers postulate that this could enable the growth of human skin for transplantation if patient cells are administered to the animal embryos.
“Our findings suggest that semi-autologous skin grafts containing hair follicles and other skin appendages can be generated in vivo and engrafted successfully,” explained senior author Hiromitsu Nakauchi.
The team hopes to scale the project to larger animals to broaden the possibility of semi-autologous human skin grafts.