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Human burn victims and others could benefit unfathomably if $200,000 or more from numerous donors were put toward research and development of replacement skin:

Burns

Each year in the United States, 1.25 million burn injuries require medical attention. Ten thousand people die every year of burn-related infections. The good news is that, in recent years, survival statistics for serious burns have improved dramatically. Twenty years ago, for instance, burns covering half the body were routinely fatal. Today, patients with burns encompassing 90 percent of their body surface can survive, albeit sometimes with permanent impairments.

Burn-induced skin loss allows bacteria and other microorganisms to access the warm, moist, nutrient-rich fluids that course through the body, while at the same time it provides a conduit for the rapid and dangerous loss of fluids. Hence, replenishing skin lost to severe burns is an urgent matter in the care of a burn patient. When a patient has lost 80–90 percent of the skin as a result of direct contact with scalding hot liquids, flames, chemicals, electrical current, or radiation, two immediate tasks come to the fore.

First, a burn surgeon must remove the burned skin, then the unprotected underlying tissue must be quickly covered.

Laboratory-Grown Skin Cells

In the mid-1980s, Dr. Howard Green of Harvard Medical School conceived a method for growing a type of human skin cells called keratinocytes outside of the body.

The product that eventually resulted from Dr. Green’s work, called Epicel, is used to treat deep wounds that require grafting (skin replacement), such as occurs with severe burns. However, since Epicel replaces the lost epidermal layer only, it works best in combination with something that restores the dermal layer of skin. Epicel is not an artificial skin, but rather a method in which new epidermis is “grown to order” in a laboratory from surgically harvested skin cells taken from an unburned area of the patient. Products like Epicel are termed “autologous” grafts, meaning that the source of the epidermal graft material is taken from skin of the same patient who receives it.

Artificial Skin

In severely burned patients who have little or no remaining skin, artificial skin is an extremely useful material not only to cover and protect the wounded area, but to promote re-growth of natural skin instead of scar tissue......"

Skin Replacement