Wednesday’s announcement by Tel Aviv University and Sheba Tel Hashomer Medical Center comes as Israel grapples with a high number of burn injuries from the war.

“This research was born out of necessity,” said Prof. Lihi Adler-Abramovich, who co-led the study alongside PhD student Dana Cohen-Gerassi at Tel Aviv University’s Laboratory for Bio-Inspired Materials and Nanotechnology. “Surgical intervention is often essential for serious burns, but the current gold-standard treatment—autologous skin grafting—requires harvesting healthy skin from other areas of the body. That can be especially problematic when a patient has extensive burns and little undamaged skin left.”

The new graft is produced from the patient’s own cells, making it both biocompatible and robust. According to the team, the engineered skin is more stable, flexible, and easier to handle than existing solutions. In animal models, it achieved full wound closure in just four days—compared to the eight days required by standard therapies. The research was recently published in the peer-reviewed Advanced Functional Materials.

Israel’s Sheba Medical Center already offers one of the most advanced alternatives, known as cultured epidermal autografts (CEA), where a small skin biopsy is used to grow skin cells in the lab. But even this technique has major drawbacks. “CEA grafts are very fragile and consist of only the upper layer of the skin,” Adler-Abramovich said. “They shrink significantly after removal from culture, sometimes requiring up to 30 separate grafts just to cover a single limb. And they’re grown on mouse-derived cells, which poses regulatory and safety challenges.”

The newly developed skin equivalent eliminates these problems by mimicking the structure of natural human skin and avoiding the use of animal-derived materials.

Image - Omer Fichman/Flash90