During severe treatment Burns and trauma, skin regeneration can be a matter of life or death. Extended burns are generally treated by transplanting a thin layer of epidermis, the upper layer of the skin, since elsewhere on the body. However, this method does not only leave large scars, but it does not restore the skin either to its original functional state. Unless the dermis, the layer under the epidermis, which contains blood vessels and nerves, is regenerated, it cannot be considered as normal living skin.
Now, the work of Swedish researchers may have brought medication to be able to regenerate living skin. They have developed two types of 3D biopriting techniques with thick skin generated artificially which is vascularized, which means that it contains blood vessels. A technique produces skin filled with cells, and the other produces blood vessels of arbitrarily in the tissue. The two technologies adopt different approaches to the same challenge. Approaches have been described in Two Studies Posted in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.
“The dermis is so complicated that we cannot grow it in a laboratory. We do not know that what is all its components,” said Johan Junker, an associate professor at Linköping University and specialist in plastic surgery who directs this work, in a statement. “This is why we, and many others, think that we could possibly transplant the constituent elements, then let the body make the dermis itself.”
Junker and his team have designed a bio-initted “μnk” link in which fibriblasts-cells that produce skin components such as collagen, elastin and hyaluronic-cock acid on the surface of the small spongy gelific grain and locked in a hyaluronic acid gel. By building this ink in three dimensions using a 3D printer, they were able to create a skin structure filled with high density cells at will.
In a transplantation experience uses mice, the researchers have confirmed that living cells have developed inside the fragments of tissues made from this ink, secreting collagen and reconstructing the components of the dermis. New blood vessels have also increased inside the transplant, indicating that the conditions for fixing long -term tissues have been met.
Blood vessels play an extremely important role in building artificial tissues. No matter the number of cells cultivated to create a tissue model, without blood vessels, oxygen and nutrients cannot be transported in the evening to all cells. And with blood vessels with the tissue structure, the cells in the center of the tissues die.
The research team also created for technology called refreshment (replay of hydrogel filaments in free floating suspension), which allows flexible construction of blood vessels in artificial tissues by printing and arranging hydrogel wires, in gels that 98% water. These sons are much more difficult thanks to ordinary frost materials and can maintain their shape even when attached or braided. In addition, they also have formal memory properties which to all to return to their original form even when they are crushed.
