Collagen vitrigel membrane: a powerful tool for skin regeneration

Severe burn patients lose wide areas of their skin and are confronted with a high risk of death because they lose an indispensable barrier against the invader, which in turn promotes water evaporation. Cultured skin is expected to be a promising technology for extensive skin defect patients, while faultless cultured skin has not been established. A skin sheet, tough and durable enough in clinical use, is urgently needed because typical cell sheets available now are fragile and difficult to handle at the time of surgery. Collagen vitrigel membrane is a novel biomaterial consisting of high-density collagen fibrils equivalent to connective tissues in vivo. With this novel collagen material utilized as a scaffold, we established a novel cultured skin sheet composed of keratinocytes and mesenchymal cell types. This cultured skin showed a fully differentiated epidermal layer, and could be handled with a tweezers. Interestingly, transplantation of a skin sheet revealed that acceleration of healing or inhibition against scarring depended on mesenchymal cell types in the skin sheet. Our findings suggest that the cultured skin sheet utilizing collagen vitrigel membrane cultured with keratinocytes and mesenchymal cell types will be a powerful tool for the wide skin defect and injury.