The scientists made the breakthrough by creating a patch of human skin on a mouse’s back using stem cells — cells which have the ability to develop into any human cell.
Skin grafts have traditionally been created from cell cultures taken from the patient — a process that takes three weeks, too long for some patients suffering extensive burns.
The new method using stem cells allows hospitals to order human skin as soon as they take in a burns victim.
“What our findings can provide is a way to cover the burns during those three weeks with skin epidermis … produced in that factory and sent to the physician at the moment they receive a severely burnt patient,” Marc Peschanski, research director at the institute I-Stem, told Reuters Television.
“They call the factory and then, immediately, they will get a square metre of epidermis which will be a temporary way to cover the burns,” he added.
“We grafted cells on the back of a mouse on which we had created a wound, and we observed twelve weeks later that the epidermis had mended itself,” said Xavier Nissan, who took part in the study by I-stem, which develops regeneration therapies using stem cells.
