Wound healing research produces full thickness human bioprinted skin | Hacker News Reader

Wound healing research produces full thickness human bioprinted skin

newsroom.wakehealth.edu

95 pointsgeox12 comments

This seems super cool but is this like battery breakthroughs? Don’t get excited until we are much closer to it being manufactured at scale/appearing in clinical settings? This is a real question—I’m not clear on the significance of these kinds of press releases.

The challenge with new battery technology is that they have to compete with mature existing technologies and their optimized manufacturing pipelines.

This breakthrough though has no real competition so far. The alternatives are skin transplants, either from one's own body (good compatibility, but limited availability) or from tissue donors (the usual immune system compatibility issues). And TA indicates that the results of those are far from perfect.

The technology also builds on multiple technologies that have been developing for some decades now, for example 3D printing of cells. It also finds applications for other tissues and organs of simple enough structure. Skin is fairly complex, therefore this breakthrough is significant.

The only issue I see are the usual regulatory overhead before it can be rolled out.

It seems kind of crazy to me that they've jumped so quickly to full skin layers.

From examples where people heal without scarring like in minor wounds, it always seemed to me like a goo of accepted but useless cells frequently replaced would be sufficient to confuse where scar tissue should form while gradual healing from adjacent skin eventually occurred.

Full paper here -> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7249461/

Another paper on the "3D bioprinter" here -> https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A448568439/HRCA?u=oregon_oweb...

Not sure if second link will work, but google "A 3D bioprinting system to produce human-scale tissue constructs with structural integrity and you can probably find it.

Can’t come soon enough.

I spent over a year recently getting over a diabetic foot wound. Basically worse possible case… right behind my big toe on the bottom of my foot, and I walk flat footed. Surgery didn’t really work. What did was basically staying off of it for about 9 months.

If I wasn’t in the bathroom or eating, I was in bed.

If I was t remote and didn’t have local family to help with errands, etc, decent chance I would have lost at least some of the foot - got a fairly nasty infection in at one point, had to do a full month of some serious antibiotics.

So, is there a potential to use this for Beauty Treatments?

Could people have older skin replaced with new younger skin?

That idea and implementation would be worth trillions....

and increase the shonky operators by a magnitude never before seen. The amount of f*ked up lip jobs happening in Sydney is appalling, and the "doctors" and "nurses" performing these should be ashamed. The industry is largely unregulated...skin would just be this x 1000.

That makes me think of dodgy treatments that can cause bone-chunks to grow in your eyelids.[0]

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stem-cell-cosmeti...

That would be a hell of a treatment. Probably have to go into a Bacta tank like Luke Skywalker after nearly dying on Hoth, have a huge chunk of your skin just sliced off and regrown in situ.

From the neck down, it would be inconvenient but not unbearable (other than needing a spinal block to prevent you from screaming nonstop for the first 2 weeks or so.

You could probably handle the head and neck pretty well, too, but then when it came time for your face? That would be straight hell, assuming you wanted to have full sensation and not just a hunk of flesh strapped to your skull.

Jesus, imagine your eyelids. Going without those for a while would be a terror.

Any way you go, you're looking at a huge chunk of money and a lot of body horror just to come out the other side looking 16 years old again.

I guess the upside is that it would be really easy to do liposuction and boob jobs and just about any other surgery you would ever want while you're already skinless and knocked out.

I'd be tempted if it were $100,000. I don't have that kind of cash but I could handle the payments on a 7-10 year loan.

Huh, I wonder if it works for mucosal membranes too.

This is super-cool!

It's incorrect to say that living things are "machines", because machines are what humans make with their hands and tools[^1]. But we damn well function like machines. No immortal soul by default, no divine preference, but yet, there is a lot of legroom for improvement and fixes[^2].

[^1]: I guess that if whales or AI would autonomously make things with moving parts, we would need new words for those too.

[^2]: Barring any cynicism, that is.

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