Sprayed Skin Cells Could Heal Burn Wounds

People get burnt, literally and figuratively, far worse and more often than anyone could imagine. Experts working in hospital Emergency Rooms (ER) often get patients with nasty, second-degree burns that need immediate attention. In some of the more unfortunate cases, people need to be treated with a skin graft, which essentially means that a skin sample is taken from somewhere else on the body, and then placed at the site of the injury. A new technique has the potential to make this course of treatment obsolete, Technology Review reports.

The thing about the graft is that, in addition to being extremely painful for the patient, it also doubles the area that is in desperate need of healing on the body. This are just two of the reasons why a team of scientists set about to create the new treatment option, which is considerably less invasive than the previous one, and may also yield better results. The only thing the surgeons need is a small skin biopsy, and a ready-to-use kit, with which to process it.

The kit would essentially identify the basal cells of the epidermis, which is to say the stem cells of the skin, and then mingle them with various substances inside a suspension. This mixture would then simply be sprayed on top of the wound. According to the preliminary results of some human trials, the method appears to be working just as effectively as skin grafts, but without doubling the body area that needs treatment, and also with considerably less pain. “Currently, treating any burn that requires a skin graft is the same technology we were routinely using 30 years ago,” Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center Burn Center surgeon and medical director James Holmes says.

The new method, dubbed ReCell, requires only four square centimeters of skin in order to reconstruct a damaged area, as opposed to grafts that need anywhere from one quarter to the full size of the affected area for the transplant. “This allows you to take a very small skin biopsy and process it at the table there in the operating room using a fully prepackaged device. You're able to cover an area that's 80 times the size of your biopsy,” the expert adds. Holmes is also the lead investigator in a new center that will soon be constructed to analyze the differences between ReCell and normal graft methods in treating burn wounds.