Grant: Project Grant

Patients with burns and large wounds need skin grafts to survive. The grafted skin should ideally come from the same patient to avoid the risk of being destroyed by the immune system. However, there is always limitation in getting enough normal skin from the same patient to cover all wounded areas. The gold standard solution to this difficulty is to harvest a partial thickness normal skin from the same patient, mesh and expand it 2 -9 times of the original size and then use it as coverage for larger burned and wounded injury site. This life saving treatment, however, comes with several adverse outcomes including loss of body fluids and heat, infection, and importantly a fishnet shape scar. To avoid these complications, our group has come up with a novel solution. We have developed a liquid scaffold that contain most nutrients and building blocks that are required for a speedy and normal wound healing. This scaffold that we call it "MeshFill" is liquid at cold temperature but solidifies quickly when applied on the wounds. Here we want to fill the holes of the meshed skin grafts with MeshFill and investigate whether it can improve the outcome and prevent complications such as deformities and fishnet like scars. We will first explore this idea in a pig wound model and then test it on a small group of patients who need meshed skin grafts to cover their surgical wounds. If everything goes well as planned, we are very optimistic that the application of MeshFill in combination with meshed skin graft would significantly improve the wellbeing of the patients who need skin grafts with a better look and fewer complications.