The skin factory

The increasing demand for reduced animal testing in consumer product development has led to a growing market for in vitro test systems. Indeed, public and regulatory requirements force producers to use alternative methods for testing the safety of new substances or products when applied to human skin. However, manual state-of-the-art processes for producing human skin equivalents or models, are expensive and time-consuming and thus not suited to high volume production. To produce skin models at a reasonable price and of consistent quality, researchers and engineers at the Fraunhofer- Gesellschaft in Germany are developing the first fully-automated system for producing human skin models, by re-engineering the current complex and labour-intensive manual manufacturing protocol.
The Fraunhofer team has already produced a prototype of the automated system that integrates a variety of novel tissue and cell handling devices and cultivation procedures. The final system will not be limited to the automated manufacturing of in vitro skin models, but should find broad application in cell cultivation and tissue engineering. Since the system design is based on state-of-the-art requirements for industrial tissue engineering, such as good manufacturing practice (GMP), it also offers the potential for the automated production of cells for human transplants.