"So a patient with 40 percent burn or 50 percent burn is usually in a hospital about 80 to 100 days." "Your donor site, once you take the skin, of course has to heal," explained Jeschke. Skin removed for these grafts can be expanded, but not by much. The greater percentage of the body that's burned, the more skin that's needed - and the less that's available. Current skin grafts for burn victims require removing a healthy section of a patient's skin to cover their wound, essentially creating a second wound in the process. Should they succeed, they'll help change a process Jeschke said is in dire need of an upgrade. The cellular tapestry gathers around a rotating drum, and strips are then collected. "That's the current issue, which is how to get cells to magnify, multiply and grow in a speed that's beyond what they normally do," Jeschke said. Growing enough cells remains a challenge. In September, members of the team were selected as the Canadian winners of the 2014 James Dyson Award, a prestigious international engineering prize that comes with cash, but only a fraction of what it will cost to get the project across the finish line.Īnd there are other questions that still need to be answered. The printer is still in preclinical trials, but Jeschke's team said they hope to move to human trials within two years, and if those go well, printers like these could be in hospitals and helping burn patients within five years.īut to get there, Jeschke said the project will need more funding. "You basically imprint your various cells into this three-dimensional matrix that comes out and it's basically ready to be put on the patient," said Jeschke. The green solution will form the skin's 3D scaffolding. The red solution, dyed that way for the demonstration, consists of skin cells, harvested from the patient, analyzed and multiplied in the lab. Much of the action takes place in the printer's cartridge. The strips are then collected and cultured. The cellular tapestry that emerges from the cartridge floats through the printer's reservoir and gathers around a rotating drum. It does so via a cartridge, which weaves the cells together with a gel-like matrix serving as the skin's 3D scaffolding.
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