Regenerative medicine: Creation of living skin lifts cell therapy firm

[Al-khiyal]

June 27, 2007 -- Intercytex, the cell therapy company, announced a clinical breakthrough yesterday with the creation of a laboratory-made living human skin that had fully integrated into the human body and closed and healed wounds.

The company's shares jumped 9.25p, or 15.6%, to 68.5p as it published results of its clinical trial in a specialist journal. It said its treatment, ICX-SKN, differed from other living skin grafts. These degrade after a few weeks - too quickly to act as grafts when implanted into the human body.

The trial consisted of six healthy volunteers who agreed to have some skin removed from their arm and replaced with Intercytex's skin graft replacement product. The company said that after 28 days, the grafts were rapidly overgrown with the volunteers' cells, and the wounds were closed and healed. The standard treatment for wounds and burns is to take skin from another part of the patient's body and graft it on to the damaged area. But this is a painful and costly process that creates an additional wound area.

Dr Paul Kemp, founder of Intercytex and the company's chief scientific officer, said the graft was aimed at those who had sustained a traumatic injury such as a burn or a wound caused by surgery or trauma. But he said it was not aimed at chronic wounds that affect the elderly or diabetics, which are much harder to treat.

Analysts at Piper Jaffray, the company's house broker, said the skin replacement market was estimated at $800m (£400m). The news could mark a breakthrough in regenerative medicine, which seeks to treat diseases or injuries by telling the body to regenerate itself.

Dr Kemp said: "For regenerative medicine to fulfil its promise, scientists need to develop cellular implants that are accepted and integrated into the human body. So far this has proved elusive but today's research shows, for the first time, that it can be achieved."

But Intercytex's skin graft is still at a very early stage, and scientists said people would have to wait until the company conducted further clinical trials with a much larger number of patients to see if it really worked. Professor David Williams, head of the UK centre for tissue engineering at the University of Liverpool, said: "Intercytex has got the right components, and put them together in the right way."

But he warned that conditions were very different in a clinical setting with real patients, where the wounds could be much larger. He added that it was difficult to get grafts right for burns, and nobody was convinced that regenerative medicine would work well in that area.

Creation of living skin lifts cell therapy firm

[Bent_Bladi]

woooooooooooow!! mashaAllah...

I saw a surgery where a little girl had burned her entire upper body and the doctors peeled the skin from her calves and put it on her face.... it looked HORRIBLE... I hope this new discovery will help little girls like her