SYDNEY, Aug. 21 (Xinhua) -- Australian scientists have grown the world's first fully functioning lab-made human skin with its own blood supply.
Researchers used stem cells to grow skin with blood vessels, capillaries, hair follicles, nerves, tissue layers and immune cells, paving the way for better treatment of skin diseases, burns, and grafts, according to a statement released Thursday by Australia's University of Queensland (UQ).
"This is the most life-like skin model that's been developed anywhere in the world and will allow us to study diseases and test treatments more accurately," said the study's lead researcher, Abbas Shafiee, a tissue engineering & regenerative medicine scientist from UQ's Frazer Institute.
The team used recent advancements in stem cell research to create three-dimensional "skin organoids," before engineering tiny blood vessels that allowed the tissue to develop like natural human skin, according to the research published in Wiley Advanced Healthcare Materials.
"We took human skin cells and reprogrammed them into stem cells, which can be turned into any type of cell in the body," Shafiee said, adding the skin model took six years to develop.
Co-author Professor Kiarash Khosrotehrani from UQ's Frazer Institute said the engineered skin could improve grafts and treatments for inflammatory and genetic skin disorders like psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, and scleroderma. ■
