- Every year, around 1,000 Britons with severe burns undergo a painful skin transplant
Doctors have developed a technique to treat severe burns using a paste made from small fragments of a patient’s skin.
The procedure involves taking a small, healthy piece of skin from the thigh, chopping it into small pieces and mixing it with a gel. The resulting paste is then applied to the wound.
The results showed that each tiny fragment can grow up to 500 times its original size, allowing for the grafting of a much smaller amount of healthy skin than is currently removed to cover burns.
Experts say that using the skin paste will allow patients to avoid the permanent scarring typical of traditional methods, as well as the painful experience of undergoing large skin grafts.
‘Harvesting the skin can be extremely painful for the patient. It looks like the worst carpet burn you’ve ever had,” says Dr. Riyam Mistry, a plastic surgery expert at the University of Oxford.
Results have shown that each tiny fragment can grow up to 500 times its original size, allowing for the grafting of a much smaller amount of healthy skin than is currently removed to cover burns.
About 1,000 Britons with severe burns undergo a skin transplant every year, a quarter of whom are children. This involves removing a piece of healthy skin and stretching it over the burned area before stitching or gluing it into place.
For large burns, the ingested patches can be very large and usually require general anesthesia when removed. This is often shaved from the back of the thigh and can leave a permanent scar.
But some experts believe that the skin paste technique could spell the end of this practice. Together with scientists from the US Army Institute of Surgical Research in Texas, Dr. Mistry the skin paste with normal grafting in pigs.
A piece of skin was ‘chopped’ into pieces with a diameter of only a third of a millimeter.
A water-based gel was then added to keep the cells hydrated before injecting them into the burn.
Within 28 days, the area treated with the paste had healed as quickly as with normal grafts.
Dr. Mistry says he is happy with the results and that a human trial is in the pipeline. He adds: ‘It maximizes the use of a small amount of healthy skin while minimizing damage to the donor site.’
The research he and his colleagues conducted will be presented this week at the annual meeting of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons in Newcastle upon Tyne.