Why don’t cultured epithelial autografts always take?
Swiss researchers are investigating why cultured epithelial autografts (CEA’s) don’t always “take.” A CEA is produced by removing living, unburned skin cells from a burn patient and using those cells to grow thin sheets of new cells in a laboratory. A CEA is then grafted back onto the burn patient. There are two major advantages of CEA’s. First, “autografts” (grafts from the patient’s own skin) are not limited to areas of the patient’s unburned skin. New “skin” can be grown. This is particularly important for patients with extensive burns. Second, the grafts are not rejected by the patient’s immune system because the grafts are “recognized” by the immune system as being part of the person’s own body. One problem with the grafts has been that, on average, about 35% of CEA’s don’t end up taking; i.e., they don’t bond with the tissue beneath the graft. The Swiss researchers focused on the percentage of the cells in a CEA that continue to live following the grafting procedure. They found t
