Moneycab.com: Ms. Marino, Cutiss has developed a revolutionary method to produce human skin in the lab. How did that happen?
In 2001 the Tissue Biology Reseach Unit, a research lab of the Department of Surgery of the University Children's hospital in Zurich started working on skin bio-engineering to solve an unmet clinical need mostly connected to burns. Unfortunately, standard of care to treat large, deep burns is scarce and ineffective leading very often to highly debilitating, disfiguring scarring. Via personalized skin tissue bio-engineering one could permanently treat large wound surfaces and minimize the scarring.
Can you briefly explain how it's possible to produce personalized large area skin grafts?
We take a small piece of healthy skin of the patients, we extract the cells, expand them, and bio-engineer skin grafts using them and a matrix.
Which are the biggest advantages over the previous own skin transplantation?
Autografting is the standard of care. If you burn your left arm, the surgeon takes a thin layer of healthy skin from a healthy body part (donor site), meshes it to enlarge the surface and transplants it onto the deep burn wound. If the burn is large, donor site shortage is a real challenge. If the wounds are deep, the thin skin which is transplanted on top will very often develop into a scar.
We can grow large quantities of thick skin grafts starting off from a stamp-size thin biopsy of healthy skin. Since our grafts are ...
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