Scientist create artificial skin using umbilical cord

Scientists at the University of Grenada have made a revolutionary breakthrough by creating artificially grown skin for immediate use. Artificially grown skin is not a new concept so why have we termed it “revolutionary”? Good question! For starters the main hurdle burn victims’ or people requiring skin grafts face is they have to wait for weeks because the artificial skin is being grown using healthy skin from their own body. This process will allow the skin to be stored in tissue banks and made available when needed. 

The study of these scientists has been published in the journal Stem Cells Translation Medicine and depicts “The ability of Wharton jelly mesenschymal stem cells to turn to oral-mucosa or skin-regeneration epithelia.” In addition to skin regeneration epithelia covering the research team is also using biomaterial made of fibrin and agarose (designed and developed by the same team). It seems like making such breakthroughs is nothing new for this particular research team as they previously won universal acclaim on Tissue Engineering. The successful creation of artificial skin is the fruition of thesis put forth by the research team a few months ago in Seoul Korea. During the briefing the team postulated the potential of Wharton stem cells conversion into epithelia cells. 

Thanks to this research major burn victims would have access to skin stored in tissue banks and which can be applied instantly to the areas of injury. This would almost cut down the waiting time for a patient to zero and curtail complications that arise because of waiting period. “Creating this new type of skin using stem cells, which can be stored in tissue banks, means that it can be used instantly when injuries are caused, and which would bring the application of artificial skin forward many weeks”, declared Professor Antonio Campos of Histology at the University of Granada and one of the authors of this study. When this process becomes available for common use it would hopefully become a routine clinical procedure and benefit trauma and burn victims the most.