Skin Substitutes: Current Applications and Challenges

Skin substitutes as an alternative to skin grafts provide immediate protective barrier against the environment and have critical medical applications to patients with extensive burns. Their initial role is to facilitate repair and reconstruction of skin layers and in more advanced approaches to maintain normal functionality and aesthetics of normal skin. Depending on their design, skin substitutes can act as temporary covers or permanent skin replacements with the main goals of reducing the need for donor sites and to decrease the risk of infection. Moreover, they minimize scarring and also can facilitate angiogenesis. However, current skin substitutes do not restore the normal skin anatomy and they lack skin appendages like sweat glands, hair follicles as well as immune cells. Recent progresses in stem cell biology and engineering techniques hold promise for simulating more advanced skin equivalents with the potential to serve as a drug screening and immune competent models.

Keywords: Dermo-epidermal Substitutes, Skin Equivalent, Skin Graft, Skin Stem Cells, Tissue Engineering, Wound Healing.