Anyone seen anything more current than this?

Skin - Cell Spray Gun Cuts Healing Time For Burns - BTF
Skin-cell spray gun drastically cuts healing time for burns.

A technique that sprays a burn patient’s own cells on the burn to help regenerate the skin and drastically reduce recovery time has been created in the US.

The gun has been under development since 2008 and has now been used to successfully treat a range of patients with serious second-degree burns.

The skin-cell gun works a lot like a paint sprayer. It was developed by Professor Joerg C. Gerlach and colleagues of the Department of Surgery at the University of Pittsburg’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Traditionally burns have usually been treated with skin grafts, which involves taking skin from uninjured parts of the patient’s body, or growing sheets of skin artificially, and grafting them over the burn.

The grafts can take several weeks, or even months to heal, and during the recovery period patients are prone to infections. Scientists have been able to regenerate skin in the lab for decades, but the process takes 2-3 weeks and the sheets of skin are fragile and expensive. After this skin has been grafted on, blisters can form beneath it due to secretions, and can push up against the sheet and damage it. These are all problems not seen with the skin-cell gun.

Skin spraying has been in use for some time in Australia, where Dr Fiona Wood of the West Australia Burns Unit developed a method called “spray-on-skin.” Dr Wood’s method uses an aerosol system to spray on cultured skin cells. This cuts the healing time to days rather than weeks or months, and the technique substantially cut the death toll in the Bali bombings in 2002.

Dr Gerlach said the new method uses an electronically controlled pneumatic device that does not injure the cells, while the other skin spraying devices are hand-pumped atomizers.

In a process taking only 90 minutes, a biopsy (tissue sample) is taken from the patient’s undamaged skin, and then healthy stem cells are isolated from the biopsy and the solution containing the cells is sprayed onto the burn.

The sprayed wound is then covered with a newly-developed dressing with tubes enmeshed within it and extending from each end. One set of tubes functions as arteries, while the second set functions as veins. The tubes are connected to an “artificial vascular system” and provide electrolytes, antibiotics, amino acids, and glucose to the wound. The dressing keeps the wound clean and sterile, and provides nutrition for the skin stem cells to encourage them to regenerate new skin.

After treatment, the wound takes a few days to heal, when it otherwise would have taken weeks to heal using the traditional treatments.

While videos, such as those above, claim the skin is fully healed after just 4 days, the skin is actually very thin and fragile, so can take several weeks to months to be completely healed.

Dr. Gerlach said patients treated at the Berlin Burn Center have regrown skin over a burned ear, or an entire face, in only a few days.

At the moment, the technique has only been used on second-degree burns, but Dr. Gerlach hopes it will later be able to tackle third-degree burns as well.

It’s been several years since the skin gun was developed, but the process continues to be improved, clinical trials have taken place and the team are working on getting FDA approval of the treatment for use throughout the U.S.

The research is funded by the US Department of Defense under the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM) consortium of research institutions, which was formed in 2008 to research better treatments for wounded service personnel.

[intelligentliving.co]...