Real artificial leather
Japanese scientists have grown a full-fledged skin from stem cells
Biologists from the RIKEN Institute have grown a full-fledged skin tissue from stem cells, which they successfully implanted into the mouse body, according to an article published in the journal Science Advances (Takagi et al., Bioengineering a 3D integumentary organ system from iPS cells using an in vivo transplantation model).
"Until now, the creation of artificial skin has been hindered by the fact that such tissue samples did not contain important components, such as hair follicles or glands of external secretion, without which the skin is not able to control the thermal regime of the body and perform other functions. Our skin has all these features and it can even be used in laboratory tests instead of animals," said Takashi Tsuji from the RIKEN Institute in Kobe (in a press release from Growing skin in the lab; the drawings below are taken from there).
Tsuji and his colleagues were able to achieve such success thanks to a special strategy of "reprogramming" stem cells, in which scientists grew not individual layers of skin, but the so–called "embryoid body" - a kind of semblance of the embryo, consisting of a mixture of different types of "blanks" of various tissues. The key to all these transformations was the Wnt10b gene, which caused stem cells to turn into different components of the skin.
Having received several such "embryos", scientists implanted them into the body of mice, where these organoids began to grow and turn into adult body tissues. When these embryos grew to a sufficiently large size, the scientists removed them, cut off their skin and transplanted it onto the body of other mice whose skin was damaged.
This operation was completely successful – the skin completely took root, and it had all the features of a healthy rodent body cover – it had quite a lot of hair follicles, sweat and sebaceous glands and other important skin components that usually cause problems when growing it.
The creation of the first full-fledged artificial skin, as scientists note, opens the way not only for the creation of the first real skin implants that will help save the lives of people with multiple burns and severe skin diseases, but also, for example, to abandon laboratory tests on animals, which cause protests among many people.
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04.04.2016