Restoration of an epidermal barrier is a definitive requirement for wound closure. Cultured skin substitutes grafted onto athymic nude mice were used as a model for a long-term study of stratum corneum barrier lipid metabolism and organization. Samples of stratum corneum collected after 12 and 21 d in vitro and 6, 11, and 24 mo postgrafting were examined for their lipid and fatty acid compositi...

Bio-engineered skin and soft tissue substitutes may be either acellular or cellular. Acellular products (eg, dermis with cellular material removed) contain a matrix or scaffold composed of materials such as collagen, hyaluronic acid, and fibronectin. The various acellular dermal matrix products can differ in a number of ways, including as species source (human, bovine, porcine), tissue source (...

Despite significant advances in management of severe wounds such as burns and chronic ulcers, autologous split-thickness skin grafts are still the gold standard of care. The main problems with this approach include pain and discomfort associated with harvesting autologous tissue, limited availability of donor sites, and the need for multiple surgeries. Although tissue engineering has great pote...

Human skin not only serves as an important barrier against the penetration of exogenous substances into the body, but also provides a potential avenue for the transport of functional active drugs/reagents/ingredients into the skin (topical delivery) and/or the body (transdermal delivery). In the past three decades, research and development in human skin equivalents have advanced in parallel wit...

A variety of skin substitutes that restore epidermal and dermal structures are currently available on the market. However, the main focus in research and clinical application lies on dermal and epidermal substitutes whereas the development of a subcutaneous replacement (hypodermis) is often disregarded. In this study we used fibrin sealant as hydrogel scaffold to generate a three-layered skin s...

Despite many years of research, daily insulin injections remain the gold standard for diabetes treatment. Gene therapy may provide an alternative strategy by imparting the ability to secrete insulin from an ectopic site. The epidermis is a self-renewing tissue that is easily accessible and can provide large numbers of autologous cells to generate insulin-secreting skin substitutes. Here we used...