LIVING bandages tailored to individuals could help cure the incurable. Early
studies suggest the dressings, which are coated with the patient’s own cells,
can mend wounds that otherwise refuse to heal.
Around 6 million people in Europe and the US have wounds that don’t heal
properly. Pressure sores, circulation problems and diseases such as diabetes can
all lead to incurable wounds. Managing them costs Britain’s National Health
Service over a billion pounds each year, a whopping 2 per cent of its budget.
And if the wounds deteriorate or become infected, limbs may have to be
amputated.
Now CellTran, a spin-off biotech company from the University of Sheffield,
has developed a way of using cells scraped off a patient’s own skin to help heal
the wound. The cells are applied to PVC discs, where they begin dividing. The
discs are then trimmed to size and placed on the wound. The skin cells detach
themselves from the disc and continue to grow until they cover the wound. “It’s
acting like a biological bandage,” says David Haddow, research manager at
CellTran.
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The key to the technique is a coating which cells can attach to and grow on,
but which releases the cells after the disc is applied to the wound. The
CellTran team has adapted the process used to coat the inside of drinks cartons
to deposit a thin film of an acrylic acid polymer onto their discs. The polymer
remains intact in a growth medium but dissolves when applied to wounds.
In initial trials, a patient who had suffered from a diabetic foot ulcer for
four years was healed after 16 weekly applications. But since the treatment,
called TranCell, has to be tailor-made for each patient, it won’t come cheap:
CellTran estimates it will cost around £2000 per patient. Doctors may
reserve it for the worst cases and try mass-produced treatments first, such as
Smith & Nephew’s Dermagraft, a gel-like matrix containing foreign skin cells
that release growth factors to encourage wounds to heal.
CellTran is now raising money for further trials. Mark Ferguson, an expert on
wound healing at Manchester University, warns that many wound treatments have
not lived up to their initial promise. He thinks the problem is that different
wounds have different underlying disease processes, which can’t yet be
diagnosed. “The science behind chronic wounds is not as far on as it could be.”