A DURABLE material made from pigskin may one day be used to repair wounds and
injuries that can鈥檛 heal on their own. Surgeons are already using it to help
skin heal and it could potentially be used to fix damaged bone and cartilage
too.
鈥淭he stuff looks like a sheet of chewing gum,鈥� says tissue researcher Ian
Kill of Brunel University in London. The material is made of a matrix of nearly
pure collagen, created by removing all the cells from pigskin during a six-week
process. When implanted into a wound it forms a permanent three-dimensional
scaffold that cells and even blood vessels grow into.
Since different animals produce collagen that鈥檚 very similar, there鈥檚 no
concern about patients rejecting implants, Kill says. And the material, called
Permacol, is an improvement on other collagen matrices, he says, because it
isn鈥檛 broken down in the body.
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These properties might make Permacol, which is made by Tissue Science
Laboratories in Hampshire, ideal for elderly people, whose skin often can鈥檛
regenerate new cells to enable a wound to heal. However, skin cells from areas
like the underarm and buttocks tend to receive less wear and exposure to
sunlight and also don鈥檛 lose the ability to regenerate so quickly, Kill says. It
should be possible to extract some of these cells in elderly patients, coax them
to grow on Permacol, and then use this new 鈥渟kin鈥� to patch a wound.
In principle, the same approach could be used to repair bone and cartilage,
which also grow on collagen matrices, Kill says. 鈥淚f we get the conditions
right, we could use Permacol to initiate cultures that could develop into a
variety of tissues.鈥� And best of all, he says, these repair kits won鈥檛 cause
immune reactions because they will be made from the patient鈥檚 own tissue.