Tissue Engineering: The Need for Artificial Skin

Tissue engineering is taking the concepts of cell biology, bioengineering, and materials methods, in order to fix or replace living tissue. One specific topic of tissue engineering is called artificial skin. Artificial skin can be defined as any material designed to replace skin that was wounded from burns or other trauma. The main purpose of artificial skin is to provide a barrier of protection from dehydration, protein loss, and infection after the skin has been severely damaged. In 1979 the first successful artificial skin treatment was used on a woman that had burns covering roughly fifty percent of her body. Around thirty years ago victims with burns that covered half of their body usually died. Nowadays, victims that have burns that cover ninety percent of their body can usually survive due to advancements in tissue engineering and medicine. 

The need for artificial skin is very crucial because it can help many people with severe burns and skin diseases. Severe burn victims of second and third degree many times are treated with artificial skin. Also, skin diseases such as diabetic foot ulcers, which are sores at the bottom of the foot caused by diabetes, have recently been treated with artificial skin and it’s becoming more of a popular treatment. Other skin diseases such as recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa occur in infants and children. Recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa cause widespread blisters and areas that have complete loss of skin. Artificial skin has been used to treat recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa and has shown good results towards the disease. Artificial skin has changed the way doctors and professionals look at treating wounded skin. The closest thing to artificial skin back in the day was skin grafts. Skin grafts were first used by Reverdin in 1871. While skin grafts have been successful in treating skin wounds and disorders it does come with limitations such as immune rejection, infection, availability of healthy skin sites, pain, and scarring. That being said, artificial skin can be a better skin substitute because doctors don’t have to stress over the availability of donor skin and the risk of the patient rejecting the new skin.

One artificial skin product that is currently on the market is called Apligraf. Apligraf is one of only four artificial skin products that are FDA approved. Apligraf is very similar to actual human skin because it has both a dermis and epidermis that are living. The dermis layer is made up of bovine collagen type 1 and dermal cells from humans. The epidermis layer consists of keratinocytes or epidermal cells, which separate and multiply forming an epidermal layer similar to the human epidermal layer. Although Apligraf is similar to human skin it is missing some key components of actual skin. Some of these missing components are Langerhans cells, melanocytes, lymphocytes, sweat glands, hair follicles and macrophages.