The doctors tried everything they could think of: Antibiotics, changing dressings, grafting skin donated by his father. Hirsch and his colleague Tobias Rothoeft began to scour the medical literature for anything that might help and came across an article describing a highly experimental procedure to genetically engineer skin cells. In the skin disease that was treated in the boy, the epidermis is damaged but the layer beneath it, the dermis, is intact. But if deeper layers of the skin are burned or torn off, it’s possible that the artificial skin would not adhere as well. For the time being, he says he’s continuing to study the procedure in two clinical trials that involve genetic diseases.

Source: thestar November 08, 2017 21:00 UTC