Fondef Fund for the Promotion of Scientific and Technological

Santiago, 15 October. The ability to create implants that allow repair injuries caused by burns, the bad bedsore healing without causing rejection, is hoping doctors, Numerous investigators and patients. n the Technical University Federico Santa Maria (USM), in Valparaiso, are taking promising steps in this direction. Source: The Mercury.

 

Now, five patients who receive services at the Institute for Worker Safety are benefiting implant prototype skin created by researchers at USM and U. Valparaiso from the culture of the patient's own tissues.

 

“What we do is take a small, thin skin of the patient fraction of no more than 1 cm square, it takes about seven days to multiply in laboratory. This allows us to take those cells and put them in a porous matrix containing a gel and then used to cover the wound area”, explains Dr. Manuel Young, Biotechnology Center director Dr. Daniel Alkalay Lowitt, the USM.

 

Once laboratories

 

The patients receiving the experimental treatment are wounds caused by the bite of a dog or the removal of an area of ​​skin that made bad scarring. “Skin cells of the film that covers the wound assist central proliferation contour thereof, and from the same patient as, no risk of rejection”, explica el doctor Young.

 

Although the results have been positive, still a prototype development to be used in burn wounds, due to the time it takes skin proliferation in laboratory.

 

To advance in the improvement of the prototype, in the coming months the researchers will begin a new project, with funding from Fondef-, that seeks to generate skin from adult stem cells taken from the patient.

 

“These can come from the hair root or other tissues. Their advantage is that they can become the type of skin cell that the body requires specific, as epidermal keratinocytes and dermal fibroblasts”, explica Young.

 

Also, or stem cells proliferate faster trunk, which would reduce to three days the time required for implant, thus could extend its application to a wider range of patients.

 

This research will begin in the new building for the USM Technological Innovation opens today. This house 40 offices 11 laboratories.

 

Along Biotechnology Center, also work in the newly created building Automation and Monitoring Center for the Mining Industry; Center for Nanotechnology and Systems Biology; Energy Innovation Center; Center for High Performance Computing for Engineering and Science, and Environmental Technology Center.