Stem cells used to grow new skin for ill child
Technique used to save boy could revolutionize treatment for burn victims, skin disease
Scientists reported Wednesday that they genetically modified stem cells to grow skin that they successfully grafted over nearly all of a child’s body — a remarkable achievement that could revolutionize treatment of burn victims and people with skin diseases.
The research, published in the journal Nature, involved a 7-year-old boy who suffers from a genetic disease known as junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB) that makes skin so fragile that minor friction such as rubbing causes the skin to blister or come apart.
By the time the boy arrived at Children’s Hospital of Ruhr-University in Germany in 2015, he was gravely ill. “We had a lot of problems in the first days keeping this kid alive,” Tobias Hirsch, one of the treating physicians, recalled in a conference call with reporters this week.
Hirsch and his colleague Tobias Rothoeft began to scour the medical literature for anything that might help and came across an article describing a highly experimental procedure to genetically engineer skin cells. They contacted the author, Michele De Luca, of the Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy. De Luca flew out right away.
Using a technique he had used only twice before and even then only on small parts of the body, De Luca harvested cells from a four-square-centimetre patch of skin on an unaffected part of the boy’s body and brought them into the lab. There, he genetically modified them so that they no longer contained the mutated form of a gene known to cause the disease and grew the cells into patches of genetically modified epidermis.
In three surgeries, the child’s doctors took that lab-grown skin and used it to cover nearly 80 per cent of the boy’s body. The boy’s recovery was stunning. “The epidermis looks basically normal. There is no big difference,” De Luca said. He expects the skin to last “basically the life of the patient.”