For the treatment of irreversible, extensive skin damage, artificial skins or cultured skins are useful when allogeneic skins are unavailable. However, most of them lack vasculature, causing delayed perfusion and hence delay or failure in engraftment of the tissues. We previously developed a prevascularized three-dimensional (3D) cultured skin based on the layer-by-layer cell coating technique (LbL-3D skin), in which cells are seeded and laminated on a porous polymer membrane for medium supply to the thick cultured tissue. Recent animal studies have demonstrated that LbL-3D skin can achieve rapid perfusion and high graft survival after transplantation. However, there were practical issues with separating LbL-3D skins from the membranes before transplantation and the handling separated LbL-3D skins for transplantation. To address these problems, in this study, we examined the use of biodegradable porous polymer membranes that enabled the transplantation of LbL-3D skins together with the membranes, which could be decomposed after transplantation. Thin films made from poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) were irradiated with femtosecond laser pulses to create micro through-holes, producing porous membranes. We designed and fabricated culture inserts with the PLGA membranes and cultivated LbL-3D skins with 2 × 106 neonatal normal human dermal fibroblasts and 1 × 104 human umbilical vein endothelial cells in the dermis of 20 cell layers and 1 × 105 neonatal human epidermal keratinocytes in the epidermis. Histological analyses revealed that the skins cultured on the PLGA membranes had thickness of about 400 μm and that there were no defects in the quality of the skins cultured on the PLGA membranes when compared with those cultured on the conventional (nonbiodegradable) commercial membranes. The cultured LbL-3D skins were then transplanted together with the PLGA membranes onto full-thickness excisional wounds in mice. At 7 days posttransplantation onto a mouse, the tissues above and below the membrane were connected through the holes with collagen-positive fibers that appeared to migrate from both the host and donor sides, and favorable reepithelization was observed throughout the transplanted skin region. However, insufficient engraftment was observed in some cases. Thus, further optimization of the membrane conditions would be needed to improve the transplantation outcome.
Keywords: biodegradable polymer; femtosecond laser processing; porous membrane; skin substitute; skin transplantation; three-dimensional cultured skin.