Skin tissue engineering using functional marine biomaterials

2 An overview of the major advances in skin tissue engineering strategies 

2 Skin substitutes with synthetic or natural biomaterials 

Different strategies have been described to replace epidermis and dermis of injured patients. Numerous commercially epidermal or dermal constructs are available for clinical uses. Commercially in vitro skin substitutes are also available to perform in vitro experiments with the purpose of studying their efficiency in different in vitro models and identifying their toxicity or possible harmful side effects, as stated by the new European community regulation on chemicals and their safe use. These constructs are composed of synthetic or natural biomaterials including or not autologous or allogeneic skin cells (keratinocytes and/or fibroblasts). 

The natural materials are often derived from skin such as, for example, collagen, gelatin, fibrin, hyaluronic acid, chondroitin sulfate and also acellular dermis from cadaveric skin origin. But materials from other origins are also widely used, such as bacterial polyesters (Valappil et al., 2007), cellulose (Teeri et al., 2007), chitosan, alginate, dextran, etc. A lot of constructs based on natural products can be found in different forms such as membrane, plate, sheet, fiber, sponge, and hydrogel. 

A supramolecular hydrogel comprising the phosphate-type hydrogelator 1 exhibits macroscopic gel-sol behavior in response to four distinct input stimuli temperature, pH, Ca +, and light. This kind of supramolecular gel with multiple stimulus-response permits to elaborate gel-based supramolecular logic gates displaying AND, OR, 

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Skin tissue engineering using functional marine biomaterials... 

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