14 DAY TRIAL // Having large batches of skin samples of different varieties at their disposal for numerous types of tests has been a dream of doctors, bioengineers and pharmaceutical companies for many years. Everything from beauty creams to burn bandages could be tested on these samples, in order to ensure that they do not cause any allergic reactions, and that they comply with the use they were created for. At this point, this is done on animals, but test results can be tainted by various problems that occur in the process. Now, experts from the Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany are developing the first fully automatic production system for two-layer skin models.
At this point, producing artificial skin is a very complex and expensive process. “The production [...] involves a great deal of manual work. At this time, even the market's established international companies cannot produce more than 2,000 tiny skinpieces a month. With annual requirements of more than 6.5 million units in the EU area alone, however, the industrial demand far exceeds all currently available production capacities,” one of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft “Automated Tissue Engineering on Demand” Project Coordinators, Jorg Saxler, explains. The other coordinator is Professor Heike Mertsching.
“Until now, the offer was limited predominantly to single-layer skin models that consist of a single cell type. Thanks to developments at our institute, the project team has access to a patent-protected skin model that consists of two layers with different cell types. This gives us an almost perfect copy of human skin, and one that provides more information than any system currently available on the market,” he adds. Mertsching is the head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB.
In the automated production process, pieces of skin are first sterilized, and then cut into very small bits. Then, they are treated with special enzymes, and made to grow in two different subcultures, which are placed one on top of the other, creating the double-layered model. Natural elasticity is then added to the product, by means of small amounts of collagen fibers, the natural elastic material that makes our skin able to stretch, twist and bend at will. With the new method, one square centimeter of skin can be fully grown and made ready for use in only three weeks.
“We have designed the production system in such a way that it satisfies the high standards for good manufacturing practices (GMP) for the manufacture of products used in medicine. And so they are also suitable for producing artificial skin for transplants,” Mertsching concludes.