Artificial skin can refer to skin grown in a laboratory that can be used as skin replacement for people who have suffered skin trauma such as severe burns or skin diseases. Alternatively, it can also refer to skin synthetically produced for other purposes.
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The skin is the largest organ in the human body. Severe damage to large areas of skin exposes the human organism to dehydration and infections that can result in death.
Traditional ways of dealing with large losses of skin have been to use skin from other parts of a patient's body (such the thigh) or from a different person/cadaver. The former approach has the disadvantage that there may not be enough skin available, while the latter suffers from the possibility of rejection or infection.
To solve these issues, research is being done on artificial skin. Typically, a collagen scaffold is used (the protein that underlies the structure of skin), which can be additionally seeded with patient's own cells,[1][2][3] or with foreskin from newborns that was removed during circumcision.[4] Additional technologies, such as an autologous spray-on skin produced by Avita Medical,[5] are being tested in efforts to accelerate healing and minimize scarring.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology is working towards a fully automated process for producing artificial skin. Their goal is a simple two-layer skin without blood vessels that can be used to study how skin interacts with consumer products, such as creams and medicines. They hope to eventually produce more complex skin that can be used in transplants.[6]
A form of “artificial skin” has been demonstrated which is created out of flexible semiconductor materials that can sense touch. The artificial skin is anticipated to augment robotics in conducting rudimentary jobs that would be considered delicate and require “touch”. It is also expected that the technology can be further advanced to be used on prosthetic limbs to restore a sense of touch.[7]