Synthetic skin, complete with blood vessels, could be available and affordable within the next six years, researchers have said.
A team working at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany is creating machines that will automate artificial skin production on a commercial scale, two months after announcing that they had mass-produced high-quality skin at a price of €34 (£29) per sample.
The goal of the new process is to produce 5,000 skin "modules" per month, each one closely resembling the real thing. "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," said Professor Heike Mertsching, head of Fraunhofer's cell systems department. "This gives us an almost perfect copy of human skin."
To scale up production, researchers have created what they say is the first automated system for producing two-layer synthetic skin.
The process starts with small pieces of skin, which are sterilised and then cut into pieces, modified with enzymes and isolated into two cell fractions. These are then grown separately on cell culture surfaces, before being combined into a two-layer sheet. The whole process takes about three weeks.
The flexible lower layer gives the tissue natural elasticity, but two-layer skins have until now been too expensive to mass produce.
The synthetic skins currently available are eventually rejected by the human body because they don't contain blood vessels. Jörg Saxler, Fraunhofer's technology manager, told Wired.co.uk that they have created skin with blood vessels using pig cells, and are working on a fully synthetic version.
That could be commercially available by 2015, he suggested.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
