Good grafting

A gel that could prevent the painful and disfiguring contractions of skin grafts used to treat burns has been developed by British scientists.

When skin is irreparably damaged by burns, skin taken from other areas of the patient’s body - or created by tissue engineering - is grafted onto the burned area. Although grafts often heal successfully, the skin shrinks significantly in nearly a third of patients. The process is painful and disabling, and particularly common in children.

Now, however, Karima Bertal and colleagues at the Sheffield University have developed an enzyme-inhibiting drug which can halve this contraction, and loaded it into a biocompatible polymer gel to smear onto the graft.

Bertal presented the group’s preliminary results at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Biomaterials conference in Manchester earlier this month.

Sheila MacNeil, the scientist who leads the research, said that currently the only accepted treatment for graft contraction is to have the patient wear pressure garments - extremely tight clothing that pushes down on the dermis to prevent it forming bumps of contracted tissue.