Design and manufacture of an antimicrobial multi-layered scaffold for skin regeneration

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

thickness skin injuries affect the quality of life of millions of people; they involve the loss of a big amount of tissue and they are normally associated with severe infections, burns or skin cancer surgery. The gold standard treatment is the use of a skin graft (a patch of skin that is normally removed from another area of the patient's body and then attached to the affected area). Autologous skin grafts are not always available and the use of tissue engineered grafts is needed. Tissue engineering approaches are clinically useful but they also have limitations. Current constructs do not deliver cells under the physiological conditions under which skin cell populations normally exist in the living body; therefore, there is a need for delivering new biomaterial devices that reproduce closely the physical space in which cells exist in the native skin.Here we propose to create a multifunctional hierarchical membrane by combining the precision of additive manufacturing techniques such as microstereolithography, the porosity offered by PolyHIPE materials and the clinical relevance and industrial scale up enabled by electrospinning. The student working on this project will explore the creation of a smart device which will mimic to a certain extent the structure of the native skin. The construct will combine 3 individual functional scaffolds containing (i) A porous layer with defined topography resembling the skin rete ridges at the dermal epithelial junction (which have shown to improve shear resistance, enhance nutrient diffusion and aid in keratinocyte differentiation); this layer will also incorporate antimicrobial agents (including cerium and Aloe Vera derivatives as well as small sugar molecules); (ii) an electrospun nanofibrous pseudo basement membrane to enhance keratinocyte attachment: (iii) a porous under layer equipped with artificial vasculature to ensure blood supply.