Researchers at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) have created a bioprinted skin that, when transplanted, integrates with surrounding tissue to close wounds faster and with less scarring than existing approaches. For the first time, a team has combined all six primary skin cell types into a thick, multilayered structure that mirrors the real thing — and then tested it successfully in pre-clinical models.
At a glance
- Bioprinted skin: The printed skin replicates all three natural layers — the outer epidermis, the middle dermis, and the fatty hypodermis — using specialized hydrogels and six distinct cell types.
- Wound healing: In animal models, grafts produced faster wound closure, reduced skin contraction, and higher collagen production, resulting in visibly less scarring.
- Pre-clinical results: A 5-cm x 5-cm porcine skin graft covered a full-thickness wound on a pig model, confirming that larger, autologous-style grafts can succeed — a critical step toward human trials.
Why existing skin repair falls short
Serious wounds — from burns, surgery, or trauma — affect millions of people every year. Current options are limited. Surgeons can harvest skin from elsewhere on the patient’s body, but that creates a second wound and there is often not enough healthy skin to work with. Synthetic grafts and donor tissue can reduce scarring but frequently fail to integrate fully with the patient’s own biology.
“Comprehensive skin healing is a significant clinical challenge, affecting millions of individuals worldwide, with limited options,” said lead author Dr. Anthony Atala, director of WFIRM. “These results show that the creation of full-thickness human bioengineered skin is possible and promotes quicker healing and more naturally appearing outcomes.”
The gap between a passable patch and a truly functional skin replacement has been the complexity of skin itself. Real skin is not one uniform material — it is a layered system of specialized cells doing very different jobs.
What makes this skin different
Earlier bioprinted skin products have typically replicated only one or two layers, or used a limited number of cell types. The WFIRM approach stacks six: keratinocytes, dermal fibroblasts, adipocytes, melanocytes, follicle dermal papilla cells, and dermal microvascular endothelial cells — the same cast of characters found in natural human skin.
These cells are suspended in specialized hydrogels and printed into a three-layer structure that mirrors the epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis. When the team transplanted the grafts onto mouse wounds, the bioprinted skin formed blood vessels and natural skin patterns and showed normal tissue development. Cell-specific staining confirmed that the printed cells integrated with the regenerating tissue rather than sitting on top of it.
The result was measurably better healing: faster wound closure, less contraction of the surrounding skin, and more organized collagen — all of which translate to less visible scarring. The findings were published in Science Translational Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The larger test — and what comes next
To move closer to a clinically useful scale, the team then applied a 5-cm x 5-cm (roughly 2-in x 2-in) bioprinted porcine skin graft to a full-thickness wound on a pig model. Pig skin is among the closest animal analogs to human skin in structure and healing behavior. The larger graft showed the same improvements — better collagen production, reduced fibrosis, and less contraction — as the smaller mouse experiments.
That matters because one of the biggest barriers to skin grafting in humans is simply scale. Patients with large burns or wounds may not have enough undamaged skin to donate. A lab-grown alternative that can be printed at a clinically useful size, using the patient’s own cells, would sidestep that problem entirely. WFIRM, which has been a leading center in regenerative medicine for decades, is now working toward human study.
Lab-made skin is also an active area of research for product safety testing, where bioprinted tissue offers a path away from animal testing. This product’s complexity and demonstrated wound-healing performance in pre-clinical studies represent a meaningful step beyond what has been published before.
Honest limits to keep in mind
Pre-clinical success in mice and pigs does not guarantee the same results in humans — the biology of human wound healing is more complex, and immune responses to transplanted cells remain an important variable to resolve. The path from a promising animal study to a treatment available in a clinic typically takes years of additional safety and efficacy testing. Still, the convergence of structural accuracy, successful integration, and scalable size makes this a genuinely significant milestone in the field.
Skin grafting has long been one of medicine’s most painful and limited tools. Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist researchers are now building a case that bioprinting could offer something better — not a patch, but a regeneration.
Read more
For more on this story, see: New Atlas — Breakthrough human-like bioprinted skin heals wounds better and faster
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