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"Living Bandages" Heal Burns with Patients' Cells

Posted: Wednesday, May 05, 2004

The bandages, launched at the British Burns Association last week, have been used successfully on patients with severe burns and diabetics with chronic wounds.

"It is a convenient way of using the patient's own cells to heal wounds," Professor Sheila MacNeil, of the University of Sheffield, said in an interview. "This is a simple dressing to take laboratory-expanded cells and deliver them back to patients' wounds."

MacNeil, who developed the bandages, called Myskin, with her Sheffield colleague Professor Robert Short, said the bandages can be placed on wounds five to seven days after a sample of cells has been taken from the patient and grown on specialised discs in the laboratory.

After the bandage has been applied to the wound, the discs release the cells and prompt new layers of skin to grow in the damaged areas. The bandage is removed after the cells have migrated to the wound.

Doctors have been using patients' own cells to heal wounds for years. Myskin, which was developed after 10 years of research, takes the technique further because the cells are grown on the bandage surface and it is put directly on to the patient's wound.

"It makes it simpler all round," said MacNeil. "You can get a much faster healing than you would have done without them."

Myskin has been successfully used on a young boy with burns to his legs and chest from a bonfire accident, a 28-year-old with similar injuries and an 80-year-old man who had been badly burned on his face and body.

The biological bandages have also helped to heal chronic wounds from persistent ulcers in diabetes patients. In Britain alone, three million people suffer from chronic wounds and 5,000 foot or toe amputations are performed on diabetics because of ulcerous wounds