Stuttgart (dpa) – Scientists at Germany’s Fraunhofer Society research organization have developed a machine that makes artificial skin fully automatically. If it receives approval from the relevant control bodies in Europe it could make animal testing in laboratories obsolete. The machine is seven meters long, three meters wide and three meters high. Inside, small robot arms take care of the work of producing skin samples. The machine can also make connective tissue and pigment cells. At the moment foreskins from male infants provide the cells that initiate the process. “The older the samples are, the less efficient cell production is,” says Andreas Traube, an engineer at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation in Stuttgart. Work is being carried out on using stem cells to initiate the skin production process. “It’s very important that the initiating cells come from a uniform source in order to avoid variations during production,” says Traube. Between three and 10 million cells are extracted from each of the initiating skin samples. These cells are then incubated to increase their number by a hundred-fold. The cells are then placed on a layer of collagen inside a one-centimeter-diameter test tube. The new epidermis that grows is less than one millimeter thick. When the scientists combine the collagen with connective tissue they can create a skin with a thickness of up to five millimeters. The entire process takes six weeks. Source: Bikya Masr, Image: flickr.com
