Human Skin Plant
From the article "And the ship sails" (Five achievements of St. Petersburg scientists in 2007)
Dmitry Fialkovsky, "Expert Northwest"
At the end of the 1980s, work began to boil in the cell culture department of the Institute of Cytology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (CIN): the institute began to receive funding from the USSR Ministry of Defense as part of a secret project codenamed "Adamant". The project provided for the creation of technology for the restoration of damaged skin. Scientists have been tasked with learning how to save the lives of people who have received critical and supercritical burns, in which conventional methods of treatment are powerless. The Department of Cell Cultures – at that time one of the leading institutions in the country, which had a unique collection of cell lines and specialists worth their weight in gold – had been solving this problem for eight years.
Funding was cut off with the beginning of perestroika, but the most important results have already been obtained. Under the guidance of Professor Georgy Pinaev, cells of the upper layer of the skin – keratinocytes - were isolated in the department of cell cultures, which were placed on the burn and quickly transformed into skin. So for the first time in our country, scientists got acquainted with stem cells. The fact is that among the keratinocytes there are stem cells of an adult organism that can turn into cells of the upper layer of the skin. The body triggers this process in case of damage – shallow burns and abrasions.
All these years, scientists continued their research, and in 2007, the Institute of Cytology received official permission for the production and clinical use of the dermal equivalent (DE) created by them. DE proved to be an effective means of healing burns in which the deeper layers of the skin (dermis) are damaged. This is an especially "important" layer, because it creates the foundation for the complex architecture of the skin. DE is a combination of a collagen gel (performs the function of a "substrate") and fibroblast cells included in it, forming the dermis.
DE as a treatment method has successfully passed clinical trials. Two cases at one time literally flooded the pages of St. Petersburg newspapers. A girl with a burn of 90% of the skin and a young man with a burn of 98% of the skin have already returned to normal life today. As it turned out, DE can be used to treat not only burns, but also trophic ulcers, fistulas and bedsores. The next step is to create a full equivalent of the skin. This is a combination of DE and a multilayer layer of keratinocytes, which will allow for more effective treatment of various skin lesions.
Having received the opportunity to treat, Pinaev thought about the organization of TE production. After all, it is impossible to continue research when serial orders from clinics are received. Such orders already exist, for example, from the Ambulance Research Institute, the Military Medical Academy, the Children's Burn Center, etc. Now the option of financing from the funds of the Regional Venture Fund of St. Petersburg is being considered. About 20 million rubles are required for the preparation of premises and specialists, equipment for "clean rooms".
In parallel, the Department of cell cultures conducts research in the field of cell therapy. Georgy Pinaev names three types of tissues that may be able to be restored more effectively – bones, cartilage and heart muscle. For this purpose, different types of adult stem cells will be used. In some areas, there are positive results of animal experiments – overgrowth of skull injuries, restoration of heart function after a heart attack, etc. "However, these are very long-term studies. We are still only observing certain positive effects, but we do not know their mechanism," says Pinaev.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru18.02.2008