A review on Skin tissue engineering, challenges and opportunities

Thousands of people lose their skin through burn injury, car crashes, and Diabetes that need an effective replacement. Skin tissue engineering is an emerging field that desire to fully and expeditiously replace human skin. For this concern, different types of skin substitution (nanofibers, hydrogel, sponges, and etc.) with both natural and synthetic material have been used. Although cell biologists, biochemists, engineers, and surgeons co-operate to fabricate a thorough skin replacement to mimic Extra Cellular Matrix, there are still number of obstacles that hinder this goal. Preventing infection, proper vascularization, and averting scars are the most challenging problems among theme.Different compounds have been used to control infection such as anti-biotics, nano-Particles, and other natural materials like honey, thyme, curcum, and etc. These materials are encapsulated, coated or grafted in scaffolds material to add a consistent and proper antimicrobial property to skin substitutions.Burn injuries eliminate vascular in wound site that cause severe problems because cell survival is limited to a diffusion distance of approximately 100 to 200μm from the supplying blood vessel. With creating new vascular in wound site, body is able to import required nutrients or drugs and export wastes that can significantly improve wound healing process. Many researches have been done in order to enhance vascularization in skin scaffolds. Utilizing angiogenic growth factors, metallic Nano-Particles, in-vitro and in-vivo prevascularization are among conspicuous efforts to increase vascularization in skin scaffolds.Burn scars can lead to causes many debilitating factors including pain, pruritus, heat intolerance, limited range of motion due to scar contraction, and lack of sweat glands and hair follicles growth. Unfortunately, few prosperous researches have been done on methods and materials to prevent scar formation. Most of investigations are focused on silicon based scaffolds and much less are investigated on other materials. However, there is a well-known clinical reality, the faster the wound is healed, the less scarring will develop.In this paper, we intend to review on papers in the mentioned challenges, introduce contemporary answers, and present future possible works in order to pave the way of overcoming infection, enhancing vascularization and preventing scarring.