Full-thickness Tissue Engineered Skin Constructed With Autogenic Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells

Current clinical prosthetic treatments for cutaneous deficiency are far from satisfactory due to their poor effect. Recent developments in tissue engineering pointed a new way for constructing tissue-engineered skin in vitro. Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) are self-renewal and pluripotent adult stem cells and are capable of differentiating into multiple cells and tissues. Moreover, BMSCs can be easily obtained and proliferated in vitro, and have no immunorejecting issues. It has been reported that BMSCs can make environment-dependent change after implantation, and be capable to migrate to pathological position and to differentiate into correspondent cells which the body needs. So BMSCs have considered as the ideal seed cells to construct tissue-engineered skin. The present study focuses on a previously unexplored area to see whether BMSCs can be differentiated into epidermal cells in vitro and attempt to apply in vivo cutaneous deficiency therapy with BMSCs as seed cells to construct tissue-engineered skin. Our experiments indicated that BMSCs originated from self could differentiate into epidermal cells and fibroblasts in vitro, and act as the key component of skin substitute featured with epidermis-like and dermis-like structure after compounding with collagen scaffolds during in vivo wound repair. The construction of full-thickness skin substitute with BMSCs as seed cells pointed a practical way for clinical wound repair.