Using such implant makes it possible to restore the skin integument lost due to deep burns, severe injuries, and cicatricial deformities.
Doctors of the A. M. Nikiforov All-Russian Center of Emergency and Radiation Medicine (RCERM) under the Ministry of Emergency Situations in St. Petersburg have applied technology of full-fledged skin recovery by means of a biological acellular implant. This is the first time in Russia. The head of the Center's public relations, Fyodor Shevelin reported about it.
"Using such bioimplant makes it possible to restore the skin integument lost due to deep burns, severe injuries, and cicatricial deformities, whereas standard transplantation with the use of free skin from hands, face or joints leads to scars, thus deteriorating the quality of the patients' life", - he pointed out.
According to Mr. Shevelin, doctors of A. M. Nikiforov All-Russian Center of Emergency and Radiation Medicine operated on a man who had suffered severe fire burns, and after standard skin transplantation his hands had lost considerable amount of movements because of scars. "One year later the patient addressed surgeons of the Center and was offered different treatment it, - Shevelin reported. - When using this implant doctors managed to restore skin to the condition hardly distinguishable from healthy".
Now specialists of RCERM are working on biological implant of domestic manufacture. "It will not have any external difference from its foreign analog, but there is one basic difference. The Russian implant is created on the basis of human skin instead of animal skin", - the expert explained.
It is expected that this technology will enable scientists to grow donor cells on the basis of such an implant in the future. "In fact it will be laboratory-grown artificial human skin", - he stated.
Doctors believe that development of such a technology will be comparable for world medicine to the man's first space flight.