Risky for the health of skin grafts can leave in the past. New technology allows you to heal by reprogramming skin cells, which themselves perform the bulk of the work.
Patients with severe burns, decubitus or chronic illnesses like diabetes are often confronted with wounds that require skin grafts. It is not only very painful wounds, sometimes they lead to deadly infections and even amputations. At this moment come to the aid of surgeons who transplanted skin from one body part to another. However, if the wounds are particularly large, then close their skin is challenging. In some cases, researchers can isolate the stem cells, grow them in the laboratory and transplanted back to the patient.
But this procedure is very time-consuming, risky for the patient and not always effective. The increase in the number of victims of diabetes and a simultaneous increase in the number of patients with skin problems gives rise to the urgent need to develop a new effective method of treating this kind of wounds. This is the focus of the laboratory at the Salk Institute, who is working on another method using stem cells. It needs to reprogram cells from one type to ensure that they become cells of another type and thus restore the skin.
This technique directly converts the cells that are present in open wounds, in the new cells by reprogramming. Theoretically it is a more efficient, flexible and, most importantly, fast treatment strategy skin wounds. Currently the technique is in the early stages, but studies show very promising results. (READ MORE)