Tissue Engineering In Burn Wound Healing: Current Modalities and Future Directions

Ahmad Oryan
2017 International Clinical Pathology Journal  
Current advances in tissue engineering and development of novel skin tissue substitutes provide a well opportunity to treat burn patients especially in the case of large burn wounds. Although the ability to culture autologous epidermal cells in-vitro from a small skin sample into multiple-layer sheets of epithelial cells alleviate the limitation of inadequate donor site in extensive burn wounds, many burn centers still face some challenges such as insufficient skin allografts which are used as
more » ... ound coverage after surgery. Today, skin substitutes offered by TERM technology to meet emergency claims have been used fairly successfully. Current options including many commercially available or marketed skin-like tissue products is facing serious problems such as very high price, sub-optimal skin tissue microstructure and inconsistent transplantation, especially in full thickness burns. The TERM scientists and researchers conducted different experiments to reach novel tissue-engineered skin substitutes, as adjuncts to accelerate re-epithelialization for wound closure and to improve the functional and cosmetic results and thus ameliorate life quality. This paper reviews the history of skin tissue engineering, explains some of the commercial products developed to treat extensive burn wounds and discusses the future direction in utilization of stem cells in the hope to improve the current practices.
doi:10.15406/icpjl.2017.04.00085 fatcat:vqex5bbo7rbxtnszn3tz6vku7i