According to a recent report by Techspot, Swedish scientists are pushing regenerative medicine towards a new breakthrough, with future doctors expected to be able to reconstruct living skin with blood vessels.
Two research teams from Linköping University in Sweden have developed two bioprinting technologies based on years of tissue engineering research, bringing medicine closer to solving the challenge of “how to provide normal blood circulation for new tissues.”
▲ Researchers using 3D printed gel
Currently, treatments for severe burns and wounds remain stuck in methods from decades ago—transplanting a thin layer of epidermis from the patient. While life-saving, this method leaves scars and fails to reconstruct the dermis layer, which includes nerves, blood vessels, and connective tissue, resulting in transplanted skin lacking natural functions.
Johan Junker, an associate professor and plastic surgeon at Linköping University, stated: “The dermis is too complex; we cannot cultivate a complete dermis in the lab, nor do we fully understand its composition. Therefore, we believe we can first transplant building blocks and then allow the body to generate the dermis itself.”
Junker’s team developed a specialized bioink called μInk, which can layer by layer construct skin through 3D printing. The researchers cultivated fibroblasts that can secrete collagen and elastin on tiny gelatin beads and printed them embedded in hyaluronic acid gel, forming artificial tissues with a high concentration of living cells.
In mouse transplantation experiments, this tissue not only survived and integrated with the host but also secreted collagen and generated new blood vessels, beginning self-repair. The appearance of blood vessels indicates that the graft can maintain life activities over the long term.
Another team developed the REFRESH technology (IT Home Note: full name Rerouting of Free-Floating Suspended Hydrogel Filaments), which uses hydrogels containing 98% water to create elastic filaments that can be knotted, woven, or shaped, and then completely degraded by enzymes, leaving microtubes that can serve as vascular channels. By designing the layout of the filaments, researchers allowed liquids to flow through these channels, enabling vascular cells to grow within them, thus simulating a vascular network.
Daniel Aili from Linköping University stated that this technology provides a flexible solution for introducing vascular networks into synthetic tissues. Experiments have also shown that these filaments can be woven into intricate three-dimensional networks, and the team plans to achieve automated production in the future to more efficiently create dense vascular networks that can nourish artificial skin or even synthetic organs.
The project also collaborates with Professor Lars Kölby from Sahlgrenska University Hospital’s plastic surgery department and has received funding from several foundations and research institutions.
Scientists remind us that despite significant progress in research, real-world issues such as inflammation and infection must be overcome before clinical applications, and extensive testing is needed to verify efficacy. The research team believes that combining skin tissue constructed with μInk and the vascular network created with REFRESH holds promise for ultimately producing functional, vascularized skin grafts to aid the recovery of severely injured patients.
Source: IT Home
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