This technology is a wearable, 3D engineered human skin substitute that can be generated in custom shapes to fit curved and irregular parts of the body, and to model region-specific skin properties for drug screening.
Current human skin substitutes are engineered as rectangular or planar sheets that do not fit curved, irregular wound areas. Implementation of planar skin substitutes requires extensive suturing to graft multiple patches on different parts of the body and limits their effectiveness for use on irregularly shaped body parts. Additionally, these constructs do not fully mimic the biophysical environment of the healthy skin due to their discontinuous boundaries, and do not capture region-specific skin properties due to their generic geometries, which are major limitations for their use in 3D skin modeling and drug testing.
This technology is a fully-enclosed 3D human skin substitute that can be engineered in custom shapes to be worn on irregularly shaped parts of the body. Use of this technology reduces the surgical time and number of sutures necessary to graft replacement skin to curved wound sites, and improves graft viability through pre-vascularization of the engineered skin. Skin scaffolds in curved and enclosed geometries determine the final desired shape of the engineered skin tissue and recreate the physiologically relevant mechanical forces of skin development. As a result, skin substitutes developed by this technology not only provide superior mechanical properties over the conventional method, but also mimic body-site-specific cellular and extracellular organization, and thereby enhance the integrity of the grafts in the areas exposed to high mechanical tension (e.g., finger joints). Compared to current skin substitutes, this technology provides more physiologically relevant, vascularized skin, which can be used for in vitro modeling of skin diseases and as a drug screening platform for topical or injectable therapeutics.
This technology has been validated in vitro and in mice.
Patent Pending
IR CU20263
Licensing Contact: Dovina Qu