Feb 03
If you’ve ever had a really bad burn – I mean second degree or worse, you know that the worst part in some cases is the dead skin peeling away and leaving behind tender exposed flesh. All you can do is cover it in cooling cream, stop poking it, and wait for it to heal over. If the exposure is really bad, doctors will graft healthy skin over the burn or wound to try and get it to take hold and cover itself sooner. If only there were some kind of gun that literally sprayed skin tissue onto your wound, covering it and encouraging the healing process.
Well, some researchers at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh have been working on using stem cells to encourage rapid growth and development of skin tissue by spraying them onto wounded areas. The process is experimental and still undergoing clinical study, but according to researchers, the results look promising. The result is a gun that literally (not figuratively) shoots skin.
The end-goal of the treatment is that doctors in emergency rooms and urgent care facilities will have a way to use a patient’s own stem cells (point of order: these are adult stem cells, which can be harvested at any time during a person’s life) in a solution of nutrient-rich water to spray a burn, wound, or area of flayed skin to speed up the regenerative process.
So far the experiments have produced a few burn victims with significant skin regeneration within a few days, as opposed to weeks. That’s a pretty significant improvement.
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