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 meter 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.
In France, 200 to 300 people a year risk dying from severe burns, said Peschanski, who hopes the new method will become a common therapeutic tool. “So it is really a new hope for those people and really, any one of us could become a severe burns patient,” he said.
