No breakthroughs since year 2000, but its worth mentioning skin mesh – the skin is cut like a chain link fence, so that it can be spread out over a larger area – and skin mince – the skin is minced up, then spread ‘like peanut butter’ over the wound so that it can be spread thinner and farther.
AFAIK, laboratory-grown skin (from your own skin cells) is still too fragile to be used for anything other than temporary grafts.
They covered most of this kid’s body I think and replaced it with skin using gene editing tools to replace the skin that had a faulty protein from a rare genetic disease.
“covering 80% of the boy’s body in strong and elastic epidermis, the researchers report online today in Nature. What’s more, he’s de”
The bit anbout “strong and elastic” was the bit I wasn’t expecting. That article also notes the importance of getting the right cells to start with, which seems to be an ongoing area of research.
Without the correction, the quote is pretty ambiguous, even alarming.