People who lost skin due to severe burns or chronic wounds have so far relied on other people's skin tissue and artificial materials. A domestic research team recently developed a technology that grows one's own new skin using materials the body remembers.
A research team led by Professor Lee Jun-min of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Graduate School of Convergence at Pohang University of Science and Technology POSTECH, together with Professor Park Bo-young of Ewha Womans University and Professor Kim Han-jun of Korea University, said on the 22nd that they developed a technology to produce customized artificial skin grafts using a patient's own cells and tissues. The study was published online in September in the international journal Advanced Science.
The autologous skin graft method, mainly used to treat burns and chronic wounds, is limited by a shortage of healthy skin for grafting and scarring after surgery. As alternatives, acellular dermal matrix (ADM) and cell injection therapies are gaining attention, but artificial materials make it difficult to reflect individual patient characteristics, and cell injections have low survival rates, limiting their effectiveness.
The team found the answer in materials that the body recognizes on its own. It is like remodeling a house without using bricks from another house, instead using the original house's blueprints and materials as they are. They created decellularized extracellular matrix from the patient's skin by removing cells and recombined it using 3D bioprinting with keratinocytes and fibroblasts obtained from the same patient. The patient's own tissue, which preserves the protein composition and microstructure as is, was used again for that patient's skin regeneration.
The customized grafts created by the team reproduced a complex protein environment similar to real skin. Collagen production by dermal fibroblasts increased 2.45 times compared with existing methods, and the formation of vascular junctions and vascular networks increased 1.27 times and 1.4 times, respectively, leading to active growth of new blood vessels for oxygen supply.
In animal experiments, complete skin regeneration was achieved in two weeks while greatly reducing inflammation. The length of epidermal migration was about 3.9 times that of existing methods, and dermal thickness also improved markedly. Unlike in the control group or when using general gelatin-based hydrogels, the grafts settled stably without bleeding or congestion. Above all, because the body recognized the graft as its own, rapid and stable closure was possible without immune rejection or scar formation.
Lee Jun-min said, "This result demonstrates an innovation in personalized regenerative therapy in that it uses materials obtained from a patient for that patient's treatment."
References
Advanced Science (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202511889