Skin Regeneration
The engineering of skin substitutes and their applications on the regeneration of damaged skin have advanced dramatically in the past decades. However, scientists are still struggling with the generation of full-thickness skin with native structure and co
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Skin Regeneration Xiaowen Zheng, Qian Li, Lie Ma, and Changyou Gao
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Introduction
The skin, the largest organ of the human body, provides a protective barrier against physical, chemical, and biological pathogens to support and maintain human health. In addition, the skin also has the function of temperature regulation, external insult protection, and detoxing. Typically, the skin has hierarchical structures including the upper epidermal layer, interlayer dermis, and subcutaneous tissue. The epidermis whose thickness is 0.1–0.2 mm consists mainly of keratinocytes derived from the capillary network. The dermis layer composes of fibroblasts and extracellular matrix (ECM) including collagen, glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), and elastin. Skin appendages such as hair follicles, sweat glands, and sebaceous glands are from the subcutaneous tissue and play a great role in the sensation, temperature regulation, and detoxing (Fig. 10.1) [1]. Burn, trauma, or chronic diseases frequently cause the loss of the skin, leading to descent of nonspecific immunity and bacterial infection, which is one of the most severe problems affecting human life quality. Thus, skin regeneration has become a major aim in the field of wound healing. In the past several decades, surgical therapies including skin transplantation have been applied to treat the loss of the skin and have achieved great success in skin regeneration. Autologous skin graft is the “gold standard” for clinical treatment of skin defect, and allograft plays a big role in the early period of skin repair as a temporary cover until a permanent skin graft is available. However, skin autograft and allograft are limited by the timely availability and donor sites. In addition, current skin grafts often suffer from a range of problems including incomplete biological functions, scar formation, and bacterial or virus infection during surgical therapies [2]. Thus, it has been becoming more and more X. Zheng • Q. Li • L. Ma (*) • C. Gao MOE Key Laboratory of Macromolecular Synthesis and Functionalization, Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 C. Gao (ed.), Polymeric Biomaterials for Tissue Regeneration, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2293-7_10
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Fig. 10.1 The structure of the human skin (Reprinted from Ref. [1] with permission. Copyright 2007, Rights Managed by Nature Publishing Group)
urgent to find effective therapy strategies for the treatment of skin loss facing with the increasing clinical need and a vast patient resource. Recently, skin substitute based on tissue engineering is being rapidly developed to bypass the limitations of conventional tissue transplantation and provide new therapeutic strategy to restore skin function [3]. Tissue engineering combines scaffold, cells, and biofactors to remodel the target tissue or organ in vitro, followed by in vivo transplantation according to the principles of materials, medicine, and biology. Ski
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