Explainer | What is artificial skin? How it’s grown and how it could help skin cancer sufferers, having been developed to treat burn victims
- A dressing developed decades ago prompts the growth of tissue ‘like skin’, rather than scar tissue, in patients. It has since been used to treat burn victims
- Today, artificial skin is used to test drugs and cosmetics, and a recent study found it helps block the invasive growth of skin cancer cells
In 1969 Ioannis Yannas, then a young scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, toured the paediatric ward at Shriners Burn Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, with Dr John Burke.
He was “shocked beyond belief” at the appalling injuries the young patients had sustained. The children were heavily bandaged and they looked so bad it was like a “prelude to death”.
On that day, Yannas felt an instant connection with Burke and knew he had to try to help the children.
Burke had already made huge advances in burns treatment. But patients were still at risk of dying from dehydration and infection if they had full-thickness burns – down to the dermis, the thick layer of tissue below the epidermis, containing blood capillaries, nerve endings, sweat glands, hair follicles and other structures.
Burke wanted to develop a special sort of dressing, a kind of bandage for burns that would keep moisture in, bacteria out and help speed up the rate of wound closure.
Yannas, who was researching collagen and polymers, thought he could help. But a dressing he developed and tested on animals didn’t just fail to speed up the healing of wounds, it appeared to slow it down. It seemed his attempt had failed.