Wound Reprogramming

If a person needs replacement skin – because of, say, a burn or a large ulcer – doctors normally graft skin from healthy parts of the body. It’s also possible, if a wound is particularly large, to grow a patient's skin cells into large sheets in a laboratory and use those to cover the wound. Neither of these approaches is ideal, however, as they can often require multiple surgeries. What if grafts, tissue culture and surgeries could be eliminated altogether? A recent breakthrough may one-day make that possible. This mouse skin (green) grew directly from the underlying mesenchymal cells (red) – ordinarily only capable of producing muscle, bone, cartilage and connective tissues – after a section of skin was removed from the animal and a cocktail of skin-specifying factors was applied. If this reprogramming approach is translatable to humans, it could be a faster and less painful way to regenerate skin.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from the Belmonte Lab, Salk Institute
• The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature, September 2018