Healing badly burned skin takes months of grafting and recovery. Except now they have developed a gun, like a paint gun, that literally sprays new skin cells onto the affected area in a process that takes an hour and a half. They take stem cells from the healthy skin annd do some science-y stuff to it and then just spray it on. It is freaking unbelievable!
Apparently there *is *no scarring. In the video, at least, the subject went from 2nd degree burns to what looked like perfectly healthy skin in a matter of days.
I guess my concern here is that he had “only” bad second degree burns, meaning there were still some intact skin structures and adequate blood flow to the sites treated. I wonder how well this would work with third degree burns where the entire thickness of skin is destroyed and there may or may not be adequate circulation to the area.
Mind you - this is nothing to sneeze at. That level of second degree burn can leave scars and result in all sorts of problems. It is worthwhile treatment even if that’s the worst level of burn it can treat. I’d just like to see something work that well on the truly worst cases.
There’s nothing in the video that we didn’t just describe to you. It’s just people talking into the camera and some shots of the gun. Chances are, your imagination is pretty accurate.
There’s a scene showing a man with severe, but healing burns to his left hand. The patch at the joint of his thumb is raw, white and pink. It also shows, I think, the same hand after the burn but before healing - very large bronze colored blisters, and then the same skin after it had been debrided. My mom, the RN, winced when I showed her the video, but it was more sympathy on her part, as she knows burns are extremely painful.
No, the man with the raw, cracked burn scar between his thumb and fingers was a different man than the one where the showed the severe, “bronze” colored blistering because the whole point was that the man with the “bronze” blistering had been treated with the skin graft gun and didn’t have the more typical results of the man with the pink/red/heavily scarred hand.
That was really spectacular - that guy had significant second-degree burns, and he was healed in days. I can only imagine that the spray-on skin would drastically reduce the pain of a burn, too.
OK, let’s make it clear; there’s a man with a nasty “open wound” burn between his thumb and forefinger. There is some stock footage of a burn like the one treated with the skin gun – before and after debridement, IIUC. The burn patient who was treated, the one they’re interviewing – was not photographed before treatment.
If circulation is impaired, a skin graft may not “take” either. It seems to me that appropriately harvested cells sprayed onto a properly prepared site could benefit even third-degree burns, but it would take a lot more time and possibly require more than one treatment or a more complex therapy. Maybe if the cells were harvested from deeper layers, it could be combined with a temporary graft,or a split-layer graft. IINAD.
The graphic nature of burned skin being healed by an amazing technology doesn’t bother me. The You-Tube Ad for the “McDonald’s Angus Chipolte Burger” that plays right before that video (that you can’t skip past) seems damned inappropriate however, if not down-right ghoulish.
