10 Most Important Scientific Discoveries Of 2019

For many years, one of the only ways to treat a serious burn was to graft healthy skin from elsewhere on the body to replace the damaged tissue. Over the years, improvements have been made in this process, to include the application of fish scales and other means, but the best way moving forward appears to be through the 3D printing of living skin tissue.

Ideally, any implanted tissue or organ should come from the person receiving it, which would eliminate the need to take anti-rejection medicine for the rest of the patient's life. Printing skin from a person's own cells is now possible, but the ways of doing this remain in the first steps. Improvements were made in November.

For the first time, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute developed a way to print living skin, complete with blood vessels, something never done before. Prior to this development, the available treatments amounted to "a fancy Band-Aid," but this improvement can one day make it possible to completely replace damaged skin, without the risk of rejection.

The study was conducted by using animal collagen and human endothelial cells, which line the inside of blood vessels, with pericyte cells, which wrap around the endothelial cells to form a structure. Within a few weeks, the cells formed a biologically relevant vascular structure, and work is already underway to improve and refine the process.