A NUI Galway research team hopes to develop 'substitute skin', a natural product used to help promote repair after serious injuries, writes Dick Ahlstrom
A Galway research group is copying nature in an effort to produce substitute skin that can promote rapid healing of chronic and acute wounds. It depends on providing a "scaffold" that the body can recognise and use to grow new tissues.
"It is as good as having your own skin back, but we are trying to fool the body," says Dr Abhay Pandit who heads the research at NUI Galway's National Centre for Biomedical Engineering Science. "We can look at it as a living tissue or something that can produce living tissue in the body."
Labs around the world are attempting to achieve the development of a universal second skin that can provide a rapid response to serious burn injuries or non-healing ulcers. "The distinctiveness of our approach is the way we are stabilising the scaffold," he explains.
As with other research groups, the team is using natural proteins to develop a scaffold into which tissues can grow, including fibrinogen and fibrin, associated with blood clotting, and collagen, the body's key connective tissue. Up to a third of all the body's protein content is collagen, so it is readily recognised and tolerated by the body, a key requirement for replacement skin.
"The material is something the body can identify. It can relate to it and the cells can understand it," says Pandit. "We are modifying these proteins to tailor their degradation in the body. You want them to degrade because you want the body to produce its own proteins, but the degradation should match the healing rate."
The scaffold in itself is not enough to promote healing, states Pandit, who is attached to NUI Galway's Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering. "The proteins act as a scaffold, then we add in other factors to that. We need to give extra factors to promote healing. The beauty of the scaffold is you can tailor the factors we use."
This requires a high degree of interdisciplinary cooperation, hence the idea of basing the research project in the Centre. "The research programme will bring together the fields of gene therapy, biomaterials and biochemistry into the therapeutic domain." Separate groups can look at the scaffold construct while others seek protein targets that promote tissue growth.
"We are actually trying to achieve a dual approach," he says. The scaffold provides immediate protection, say after a burn injury, and is accepted by the body. The extra protein factors it carries then encourage the body to heal and grow replacement tissues.
This quick response is essential if the approach is to be used in the event of a burn. A slightly different approach is needed in the treatment, for example, of non-healing leg ulcers, a common condition in diabetics. Ulcers account for about 50 per cent of all lower-limb amputations in a given year and a study in Waterford several years ago showed that 11 per cent of the patients with diabetes had experienced non-healing leg ulcers.
The team's main goal is to produce a bilayered composite, with one layer that mimics the skin and another that directs dermal regeneration. "Using analogues of human skin, this research is geared towards producing a final product which would reduce the need for skin grafts and would also result in significantly less suffering being endured by the patient."
While skin replacement is the initial target, the same approach could be used in a wide range of tissues, Pandit adds, from cartilage to organs. The key is to have a scaffold and embedded factors to match processes natural to the body.
Funders for the research include Enterprise Ireland, the Health Research Board, the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology and the Centre itself. If successful the research could "lead to clinical trials for treatment of chronic wounds and investigative work in tissue engineering" that could benefit millions of patients worldwide, says Pandit.