14 DAY TRIAL // In a paper published in a recent issue of the journal Stem Cell Reports, an international team of researchers details the creation of a lab-grown skin layer that, they say, can successfully replace animals when it comes to testing cosmetics and various drugs.
What's more, the scientists say that, in time, it might even be possible to use such laboratory-made skin to both study rare and common skin disorders, and develop better therapies for them.
EurekAlert tells us that this lab-grown skin layer is the creation of specialists working with King's College London and the San Francisco Veteran Affairs Medical Center, and that it was engineered from human pluripotent stem cells.
In their paper in the journal Stem Cell Reports, the scientists detail that the skin layer they have successfully created in a laboratory is the epidermis, i.e. the outermost skin layer that serves as a protective barrier between the body and the environment.
More precisely, previous studies have shown that the epidermis helps keep microbes and toxins from entering the human body, and also ensures that water does not get out, the researchers who worked on this project explain.
The laboratory-made epidermis pieced together by the King's College London and the San Francisco Veteran Affairs Medical Center scientists is said to have a functional permeability barrier similar to that of real skin. Its structural and functional properties are argued to also be similar to those of normal skin.
The engineered skin layer was created from human-induced pluripotent stem cells that the researchers first used to obtain pure keratinocytes, i.e. cells that are predominant in skin's outermost layer. These cells were then put together and made to form three-dimensional epidermal equivalents.
“Our new method can be used to grow much greater quantities of lab-grown human epidermal equivalents, and thus could be scaled up for commercial testing of drugs and cosmetics,” researcher Dusko Ilic commented on the importance of this breakthrough.
“Human epidermal equivalents representing different types of skin could also be grown, depending on the source of the stem cells used, and could thus be tailored to study a range of skin conditions and sensitivities in different populations,” he added.
Dr. Dusko Ilic says that, unlike many current methods of testing drugs and cosmetics, resorting to their lab-grown epidermis would prove significantly more cost-effective. Besides, it could eliminate the need to use animals in various clinical trials.
“The ability to obtain an unlimited number of genetically identical units can be used to study a range of conditions where the skin's barrier is defective due to mutations in genes involved in skin barrier formation, such as ichthyosis (dry, flaky skin) or atopic dermatitis.”
“We can use this model to study how the skin barrier develops normally, how the barrier is impaired in different diseases and how we can stimulate its repair and recovery,” Dr. Theodora Mauro with the San Francisco Veteran Affairs Medical Center also stressed.