Taking skin from a donor site is painful and sometimes the patients do not even have enough unburned skin to transplant.

 

Wake Forest accomplishes the skin printing by way of laser scanning and a modified inkjet printer. The laser scans the patient's burn and that information gets translated into a personalized plan for filling the wound up with cells. Then the inkjet printer lays down the cells individually, one layer at a time until the burned area is completely covered.

 

They are already running clinical trials with mice at Wake Forest and the results have been positive. The mice treated with the printed skin cells healed two weeks faster than mice which did not receive the treatment.