Burn victims saved by ‘magic’ skin gun New arteries... made in the lab
BURN victims are making incredible recoveries thanks to a revolutionary ‘gun’ that sprays stem cells on to their wounds, enabling them to rapidly grow new skin.
People who suffer extensive burns usually have to endure weeks or even months of treatment, with surgeons taking large sheets of skin from elsewhere on the body and grafting them.
The process is painful and patients are often left with permanent, unsightly scars.
Now doctors in the US are using a new technique that allows patients to regrow a new layer of healthy skin in as little as four days. Patients who have benefited say their new skin is virtually indistinguishable from that on the rest of the body.
Thomas Bold, chief executive of RenovaCare, the company behind SkinGun, said: ‘The procedure is gentler – and the skin that regrows looks, feels and functions like the original skin.’
First, a small patch of healthy skin the size of a postage stamp is removed. The stem cells are then separated and put into a solution that is sprayed on to the wound. The process takes just 90 minutes.
In one case, a 43-year-old man sustained an extensive hot water scald to his left shoulder and upper arm, so bad that it left him with huge raised welts. He was sprayed with 17 million cells and within six days new skin had formed over the whole wound and he was discharged from hospital. Within six weeks he had recovered the full range of motion.
In another case, a 35-year-old man suffered electrical burns to more than a third of his body. Doctors harvested nearly 24 million stem cells from an area smaller than an iPhone and sprayed them back on to his body. After four days, a thin layer of skin had regrown over his arms and chest, areas which had suffered the least deep burns. After 20 days, ‘all of the areas treated with cell spray grafting were noted as completely healed’.
Mr Bold said the SkinGun meant that new skin could form evenly across the whole wound from day SCOTTISH scientists are pioneering a ‘cheap and easy’ way of making new blood vessels which could revolutionise treatment for children with heart defects.
Experts at universities in Glasgow and Edinburgh used a standard metal needle as a mould dipped into a gel containing stem cells to create delicate living tubes. Now they have funding to work with a leading heart specialist from Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Children to use the method to develop living arteries.
They hope patients will be saved the risk of the repeated operations at present needed to replace existing artificial vessels, which rarely last more than ten years. one without painful grafting. More than 60 patients have now been treated with the SkinGun and RenovaCare is applying to use it routinely in the US and Europe.
Lieutenant Colonel Professor Steven Jeffrey, consultant plastic surgeon at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, said the SkinGun had the potential to transform the treatment of large burns.
He added: ‘With a big burn, it’s a race between a graft getting a hold and infection killing you.’
Stem-cell methods cut risk by speeding healing and providing new skin from a very small area.