Trading today, page-66

Just as a follow up on this subject, and yes it does say long term, that to me could be in say 4 to 5 years perhaps, but if it comes off then this new method would soon become the gold standard AIMHO? you will notice that it also says there are limitations with CEA sheets!
They may be the first pass on this new treatment but for how long is the question?

NB I also see that they are using the Alfred hospital burns unit in this endeavour.

http://www.med.monash.edu.au/surgery/alfred/research/skin-tissue-lab.html
Skin Tissue Culture Laboratory

Research Programmes

Using CEA technique we are able to culture a patient's own keratinocytes from a small skin biopsy to obtain large amounts of cultured epithelium within 3 weeks in a clinical trial setting.
Tissue-engineering a Human Skin Equivalent (HSE)

A major limitation of CEA sheets is that they require signals from the dermis in vivo to proliferate and to form functional skin upon grafting and cannot be used alone to treat deep burns .
Our long term goal is to develop an autologous skin composite to replace both dermis and epidermis in a one stage procedure. We are currently conducting experiments to determine optimal methods for keratinocyte culture on commercially available ‘dermal’ scaffolds. HSEs are subsequently tested in animal mouse models.
We use a wide range of techniques in our studies including primary cell culture, immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence, FACS, RT-PCR and animal models.
Optimising Adult Keratinocyte Growth Conditions

Adult keratinocytes have limited proliferative abilities in culture. Established techniques for CEA culture rely on murine fibroblasts as feeders and may not be ideal for clinical applications. We are examining alternative methods to optimize keratinocyte proliferation in culture using defined factors.
Identification/Isolation of Stem Cell population from Adult Skin

In vivo, epidermal proliferation occurs in the basal layer. Basal layer epidermal cells (mostly keratinocytes, shown below) can be divided into three subpopulations: keratinocyte stem cells (KSC), transit amplifying cells (TA), and cells committed to differentiation (ED) based on cell kinetics. We are interested in using known stem cell markers as well as novel methods to isolate human adult epithelial stem cells to enhance regeneration capacities of engineered skin.