The world first medical trial to treat life-threatening burns

Stem cells will be used to grow skin for burns patients with life-threatening injuries under a world first medical trial in Melbourne.
The trial is the culmination of ten years of work by scientist from Monash University and The Alfred hospital and is being rolled out in 2023.
Head of the Victorian Adult Burns Service and plastic surgeon at The Alfred hospital, Associate Professor Heather Cleland, said improvements in technology have made the trial possible.
“You grow a structure with some barrier function, and also some resilience, and it’s possible to get this to graft on to the patients wounds and persist and heal the wound for them,” she said.
“At the present time, we’re proposing to trial relatively small areas, there’s no point in producing large amounts of something that’s not functionally useful.”
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