Skip to main content

Yarn made from lab-grown skin sounds horrifying, but it may help save your life

You probably won’t want your holiday sweater knitted with it, but yarn grown from human skin cells could nonetheless be a crucially important invention for future tissue grafts and organ repairs. The “human textiles” have been developed by researchers at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. Unlike synthetic materials which are currently used for things like sutures or scaffolds for growing tissues, skin cell yarn won’t provoke an immune system reaction that can cause inflammation in patients. Instead, they could seamlessly be woven into hosts without risk of rejection.

“We start with normal adult human cells that are grown in the lab, at the bottom of a special plastic container,” Nicholas L’Heureux, the researcher who led the work, told Digital Trends. “On that plastic, the cells will synthesize and assemble what is called an ‘extracellular matrix’ or ECM. The ECM is the basic scaffolding of practically every organ in the body. The most abundant, and best know, part of the ECM is a protein called collagen. In the right conditions, the cells will deposit a layer of ECM at the bottom of the container as a continuous sheet.”

The scientists then take this sheet — or “cell-assembled matrix” (CAM) — and cut it into ribbons of just a few millimeters width. These can be used directly as yarn or twisted into special threads with subtly different mechanical properties. The process allows the researchers to produce textiles that can be used for any of the well-known assembly approaches of the textile industry, including weaving, knitting, and braiding. In a recent proof-of-concept demonstration, the researchers used the skin-based yarn to stitch closed a wound on a rat.

“Our main goal is to produce a vascular graft made by weaving the CAM yarn,” L’Heureux continued. “We are currently building prototypes and learning more about the handling of that new material. We will soon start testing these grafts in animals so that we can eventually move to human trials for patients who need heart bypass, leg bypass, or a vascular graft for hemodialysis.”

While this work may not be quite ready for prime time just yet, related work by L’Heureux is already being used to help people. For instance, he has used his skin cell-based sheets to create a scaffold for lab-grown skin that is today being used on burn patients. It is also being utilized by L’Heureux’s colleagues to create nerve guides to repair nerve injuries, while investigations are underway for other use cases such as its use in heart valve prototypes and lab-grown ligaments for orthopedic repair.

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Acta Biomaterialia.

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This Porsche 718 uses components made from hemp to save weight
Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 Clubsport

Previous

Next

Read more
Sticking these tiny needles in your eye may help fight blindness
eye diseases microneedles patch sample 2

An eye patch covered in tiny needles sounds like a torture device straight out of one of the Saw movies. In fact, it’s the invention of researchers in Singapore, who have been searching for a better way of treating eye diseases, such as glaucoma and macular degeneration.

Currently, these diseases are most commonly treated with eye drops. However, eye drops are not always sufficient to deliver large enough quantities of drugs. Nor are they particularly well-suited for delivering drug doses over an extended period of time. That’s where the somewhat squirm-inducing new treatment comes into play. It involves an eye patch studded with tiny dissolvable needles. The patch is placed onto the patient's eye and then removed, leaving the microneedles embedded in their cornea. The microneedles consist of two layers: An outer layer which delivers an initial drug dose and an inner layer which delivers a secondary drug dose over the course of several days.

Read more
This high-tech shopping cart from Walmart could save your life
Walmart

Today's businesses want to find out as much as they can about the people who use their services so they can improve their offering with a view to building an even more lucrative operation.

Store cards and apps already help retail businesses collect customer data, but Walmart would like to know what you're feeling when you're inside its stores, and has come up with an idea for a way to find out.

Read more