This “yarn” grown from human skin cells can be knitted into your body

French researchers have created a yarn grown from human skin cells that can be used to make implantable “human textiles” for tissue grafts or organ repair.

Yarn grown from human skin cells has a variety of potential applications

A team of researchers at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Bordeaux have grown yarn from human skin cells that they call a “human textile” — which they say could be used by surgeons to close wounds or assemble implantable skin grafts.

For example, the researchers produced woven tissue-engineered vascular grafts with burst pressure, suture retention strength and transmural permeability that surpassed clinical requirements. This novel strategy holds the promise of a next generation of medical textiles that will be mechanically strong without any foreign scaffolding, and will have the ability to truly integrate into the host's body.
This yarn can be used as a simple suture material or to produce the first human textiles. For example, the researchers produced woven tissue-engineered vascular grafts with burst pressure, suture retention strength and transmural permeability that surpassed clinical requirements. This novel strategy holds the promise of a next generation of medical textiles that will be mechanically strong without any foreign scaffolding, and will have the ability to truly integrate into the host’s body. Source: Magnan&al/ActaBiomater

Researchers can sew pouches, create tubes, valves and perforated membranes from the yarn

A team of researchers at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Bordeaux have grown yarn from human skin cells that they call a “human textile” — and they say it could be used by surgeons to close wounds or assemble implantable skin grafts. — reported Futurism earlier this month.

“These human textiles offer a unique level of biocompatibility and represent a new generation of completely biological tissue-engineered products,” the researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Acta Biomateriala.

The key advantage of the gruesome yarn is that unlike conventional synthetic surgical materials, the material doesn’t trigger an immune response that can complicate the healing process, according to New Scientist.

To create it, the researchers cut sheets of human skin cells into long strips and then “wove” them into a yarn-like material that can be fabricated into a variety of shapes.

“We can sew pouches, create tubes, valves and perforated membranes,” lead researcher Nicholas L’Heureux told New Scientist. “With the yarn, any textile approach is feasible: knitting, braiding, weaving, even crocheting.”

So far, the researchers have used the special yarn to stitch a rat’s wounds and help it fully heal over two weeks. They even created a skin graft, using a custom-made loom, to seal a sheep’s artery and stop it from leaking.

The work builds on prior research by the same team in which they produced sheets of biomaterial and rolled them into artificial blood vessels. 

Source: Futurism

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