Tissue engineering is emerging as a multidisciplinary field in healthcare which combines biomaterials, engineering design, informatics, medicine, and the life sciences to create biological substitutes that restore, maintain, grow, or improve tissue function or a whole organ. It involves principles such as cell extraction and manipulation, biocompatibility, culture, and synthesis.
Innovations in this field have been made in developing tissue for bone and bone marrow, cartilage, blood, as well as organs such as the bladder, heart, liver, and pancreas. The most recent breakthrough was just seen in The University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where doctors have successfully introduced a gun that sprays stem cells onto damaged skin.
In this revolutionary process, stem cells are first isolated and harvested from healthy skin, placed in a water solution, sprayed on damaged skin, aqnd dressed in amino acids, antibiotics, electrolytes, glucose, and sugar. The 90-minute procedure has been trialed on a dozen burn patients, and results have shown that as compared to the standard healing period of weeks or months using traditional skin culture, the skin spray gun has completely healed severe burns within a few days.
