Skin substitutes for burn wound healing: current and future approaches

Abstract

Partial-thickness burn wounds can heal spontaneously, but full-thickness burns require skin grafting for definitive wound closure. Historically, the gold standard for closure of excised full-thickness burns is split-thickness skin autograft. Patients with very large burns have limited donor sites for harvesting of autograft and may benefit from the use of skin substitutes. Engineered skin substitutes that may provide temporary wound coverage until donor sites are ready to be reharvested for autograft, or if they contain autologous cells, may provide permanent wound closure. Relatively few permanent skin substitutes are currently available, but developments in tissue engineering of human skin are expected to soon provide improved models for increased availability and enhanced healing of burn wounds