THOUSANDS of patients with severe burns or long-term wounds that refuse to heal could soon be helped with bandages made from their own skin cells.
The Myskin bandage, which has taken ten years to develop, is made after taking a skin biopsy, usually from the patient’s thigh.
The skin cells are then cultured in a laboratory setting and grown on a specially-developed type of plastic.
Once
the disc-shaped plastic patch is applied to the skin, the skin cells release into the wound and kick-start new layers of skin growth.
A reserve supply of cells is also retained by the laboratory so as to facilitate further treatment.
The treatment, which is being launched today at the British Burns Association’s annual meeting, is the first time that skin cells have been grown directly on a bandage that is then applied to a patient.
The technique could have major implications as each year in the UK three million people suffer serious wounds. These include 1,000 severe burns injuries and some 5,000 foot or toe amputations performed on diabetics suffering persistent ulcers. Skin cells have previously been grown in a laboratory setting, but, unlike the bandages, it took longer before they were ready for use on a patient and they had a shorter shelf-life.
The Myskin bandages are also much easier to use, as in the past it was difficult to transfer cultured skin cells from the petri dish to the patient.
In one test, a nine-year-old boy, who suffered burns to his back and legs, showed signs of healing within just three days of receiving the revolutionary treatment.
A former prisoner of war, now in his 80s, who developed ulcers on his legs while interned in a Japanese camp, was also successfully treated with the "living bandage" after failing to respond to various treatments over the past 60 years.
Prof Sheila MacNeil, who was a member of the research team working on the Myskin bandage at Sheffield University, said: "The plastic on which the cells are placed had to be good enough to allow them to grow but not too good, otherwise the cells would not leave the surface of the plastic to go on to the wound bed.
"The bandages can be used in addition to skin grafting to help a patient’s skin go further.
Because the skin used for a graft is stretched, it has holes in it, similar to a string-vest effect, which is where the bandages can come in."
The bandages were also very good at treating the donor site from which the skin graft was taken.
"Left to its own devices, this area would heal in about ten days, and very often, for burns patients, a surgeon has to take another graft from the same place once it has healed.
"We found that by using Myskin, this area healed within five to six days as opposed to ten or 12."
The Myskin bandages, which were developed by a research team at the Sheffield company CellTran, with financial support from the Wellcome Trust biomedical research charity and the White Rose Technology Seedcorn Fund, could also prove useful in treating ulcers in diabetics, who currently account for 78 per cent of amputations in the UK.
David Ralston, a burns and plastic surgeon at the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield, said: "The bandages have produced some excellent results. We have only used them in a few cases so far but they seem to work very well indeed."
The full article contains 602 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
