Your medicine cabinet might look very different before long, and the way we think about skin and tissue healing might as well. Prepare to say goodbye to bandages, ointments, and pain relievers… because we now have a real life wound-healing ink pen, and it is exactly what it sounds like. This pen, developed by scientists at Nanjing University in China, is full of bioactive “ink” derived from the white blood cells our bodies make naturally. It can heal in days.
Having one of these pens in homes, workplaces, and schools could help reduce the need for some procedures (like getting minor stitches) that currently need to be done in a medical setting and could be used to treat slow-healing wounds and burns. But what if we could go even further, make skin itself? Yes, we are talking about artificial skin, and with several entities aiming to bring it to fruition, we’re about to find out what that world will look like to live in.
That’s because projects like the one by French company Urgo Group are being financed to research artificial skin. This particular project, called Genesis, is supported by $27.7 million in funds from the French government as part of their France 2030 initiative to promote research and innovation, which they see as imperative to their growth. Urgo specializes in wound care products and a success will look like artificial skin for the treatment of deep skin wounds and massive burns.
This skin should mimic functions like temperature regulation and protection, and making it is considered tissue engineering. Tissue engineering is a space within regenerative medicine that concerns itself with creating living, functioning tissues to repair or replace damaged tissue. Thanks to technology, it’s growing quickly. The ultimate goal is to create tissue that functions as, and integrates with, the body’s naturally grown tissue.
Making artificial tissue, or skin, to treat wounds entails the use of stem cells, which can be thought of as boilerplates, and 3D printing as a manufacturing process for biological materials. With the rise in chronic disease, an aging population, climate change, and the pandemic aftershocks to our bodies, the field should continue to move along swiftly. According to Market.us, the global tissue engineering market should be over $35 billion by 2032.
One company that might ring a bell in this space for some is Organogenesis Holdings, Inc., a regenerative medical company headquartered in Canton, Massachusetts bringing the world chronic wound treatment in the form of Apligraf, a bioengineered skin substitute. Their technology, made up of living cells, closes hard-to-heal wounds fast, and it’s perking up some important ears. Another is Biolife4D, a Chicago-based biotechnology company that prints human heart tissue.
According to a filing submitted to the SEC recently, Biolife4D, which has been chattering about an IPO for some time now, is supposedly looking to upsize that IPO to $10 million from $8 million. BioLife4D uses bioprinted tissue made from a patient’s own cells, that way patients can worry much less about their body rejecting it. The company has had success with initial studies, and we should see more of them in the way of human trials as long as all goes well.
Speaking of animal testing, that’s one problem that artificial skin could potentially solve. That’s not just our assertion, our own FDA recently called for the reduction in the use of animal-derived tissues in testing and the NIH has called for greater diversity in testing. One New Orleans-based biotechnology company called Obatala Sciences, which recently closed a $3 Million Series A funding round, is ready for it.
They have this big bag of goodies, including human-derived hydrogels for 3D cell growth, a biobank of adult human stem cells, media for cell growth and differentiation, and complete tissue chip kits for drug discovery and development. And we now know replacing animal skin with artificial skin for testing works, because researchers with the University of São Paulo’s School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (FCF-USP) in Brazil confirmed as much, then published the data in the journal Bioprinting.
Just like that pen could change your medicine cabinet, cheaper access to technology could change animal testing. That’s because scientists with Cardiff University’s School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences successfully built a fully functional 3D printer out of LEGO able to print synthetic skin and other tissues. That makes it pretty cheap to do… and it makes us wonder what the future of this space holds. Come back next week, we’ll have more from the IPO world.