Improving wound treatment with tissue-engineered composite skin

The Skin Tissue Culture Laboratory group, Alfred and Monash.
L-R: Dr Marisa Herson, Dr Shiva Akbarzadeh, Ms Michelle
Paul, Ms Heather Cleland, Director Victorian Adult Burns
Service (VABS); Ms Lipi Shukla, PhD student

Tissue-engineered composite skin is a promising therapy for treatment of chronic and acute wounds, including burns. Providing the wound bed with a dermal scaffold populated by autologous dermal and epidermal cellular components can further entice host cell infiltration and vascularisation to achieve permanent wound closure in a single-stage.


The research group's proposed method was efficient in producing an in vitro near native Human Skin Equivalent using the chosen “off the shelf” porous scaffold (Integra®). The same principles and promising outcomes should be applicable to other biodegradable porous scaffolds, combined with autologous cells, for use in wound treatment.

Reference: Paul M, Kaur P, Herson MR, Cheshire P, Cleland H, Akbarzadeh S. Use of clotted human plasma and aprotinin in skin tissue engineering - A novel approach to engineering composite skin on a porous scaffold. Tissue Eng Part C Methods. 2015 May 21. [Epub ahead of print]

Research group: www.med.monash.edu.au/surgery/alfred/research/skin-tissue-lab.html