Doctors who specialize in wound management are growing skin to help people save their limbs and extremities. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies are extracting collagen -- a protein that makes up 75 percent of skin -- from donated skin and creating grafts, or patches, that can induce a patient's own skin to grow. The donated skin can come from a variety of sources: anything from a pig's pancreas to a baby's foreskin.In most cases, a scrape or cut mends itself or can be helped along with a Band-Aid and some antibiotic cream. These injuries heal because our skin is designed to repair itself. Yet in the case of large or deep wounds, the skin doesn't heal because it has become so infected, it turns gangrenous and can't grow new cells.
The idea behind these collagen grafts is to create a sort of scaffolding into the wound, upon which a patient's cells can attach and grow. Although these collagen patches can be used to treat the wounds of soldiers and burn patients, they are more commonly prescribed for people who suffer from peripheral artery disease, pressure ulcers and diabetes.
0 comments:
Post a Comment