Skin from the factory

The rising demand for the substitution of animal experiments has lead to a growing market for in vitro test systems. Public and regulatory pressure increasingly forces enterprises to deploy alternative methods for testing new substances or products regarding their safety when applied to the skin. And what could be more natural than using human skin itself for this purpose?

Human skin equivalents depict a promising technology to meet the increasing demand for in vitro test systems. However, the state-of-the-art process for producing these so called skin models is too expensive and time-consuming for mass production.

In order to produce skin models at a reasonable price and constant quality, we from Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft are working on the automation of the production process. With a dedicated team of cell biology and engineering professionals, we possess the know-how required for realizing the first production system worldwide which fully automates the production process of human skin equivalents. We have entirely reengineered the complex and personnel-intensive manual manufacturing protocol into an automatable and industrially feasible manufacturing process. A prototype of the production system will be running by the beginning of 2011 producing 5,000 fully functional skin equivalents per month. More information...