"It looks very unspectacular, I actually find it kind of fish-tanky," says Dr. Marc Jeschke, director of Ross Tilley Burn Centre.
It may not look like much, but a 3D printer could revolutionize burn treatment.
"It's cutting edge. The printer tells the cell where to go,"
Researchers at the University of Toronto and a team at one of Canada's largest burn centers have invented a process for making artificial skin on demand.
"We would be able to harvest cells from the patient's own skin, print them into these graphs and then place them onto the wound as soon as possible," says inventor Lian Leng.
Current skin grafts also use a patient's healthy skin -- but require a lot of it, creating another wound.
"So a patient with 40% burn or 50% burn is usually in a hospital about 80 to 100 days until he's fully recovered," says Jeschke.
Researchers want to cut that down way down.
"So he could be out in three instead of 10 weeks."
It starts with the skin cells -- harvested from the patient, analyzed and multiplied in the lab.
"We grow these cells in various containers, and make them exactly into the cell type that we want."
That's the red solution, dyed for demonstration. The green solution will form the skin's 3D scaffolding.
"To organize the red material and keep it in place," says Leng.
They're fed through an intricate web of channels, emerging from the cartridge as a woven mosaic -- the location of the cells directed by computer.
"Saying this cell has to go here, this cell has to go here, this cell has to go here."
The cellular tapestry gathers around a rotating drum, and strips are then collected.
"So then you basically imprint your various cells into this three-dimensional matrix that comes out and it's basically ready to be put on the patient," says Jeschke.
