A Skin Substitute Reepithelialization Calculator for Natural, Synthetic, and Composite Skin Cell Scaffolds

Abstract

Tissue engineering is a rapidly advancing field. Researchers around the globe have been working on novel ways to replicate the natural properties of tissues and organs. While new technologies enable increasingly complex therapeutics few of them have been found to be acceptable for clinical use. The skin is an excellent test bed for the techniques necessary for organ replacement. Skin is naturally regenerative, easily accessible and not as metabolically active as many other organs. This study analyzes published work to compare the epithelial wound repair rates of natural, synthetic, and hybrid tissue engineered skin substitutes to develop a wound repair calculator. Over 1,000 data points were utilized from 232 papers, linear regression produced a wound repair rate equal to the amount of wound repair per hour for each therapeutic class. Repair rates varied widely both within and across different therapeutics. Precision tests of the calculator’s accuracy using 30 papers produced little concordance. The data reported in the tissue engineering papers examined here vary too greatly for accurate predictions of reepithelialization suggesting that the driving force in wound repair is not being effectively accounted for within the published works.