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Between 1 - 2 million Americans seek medical attention for burns each year. Most are mild, and heal all by themselves; but some are horrifyingly severe. Severe burns are one of the most difficult injuries to treat because of the constant pain endured by the patient, as well as the extremely high risk of infection. Even if the pain and risk of infection can be decreased, patients are often left with debilitating scars that they carry for life. That’s why, for burn patients, Jörg C. Gerlach is a medical Superman.
Gerlach, along with his colleges at Stem Cell Systems GmbH in Berlin, believe they are about to revolutionize the treatment of severe burns; and they are going to do it with guns. Not just ordinary guns, however; skin cell guns. This experimental gun utilizes a solution composed of the patients own skin stem cells to evenly coat burn sites with the patient’s own cells which then become skin cells. This is much different from traditional methods where individual sheets of the patient’s skin are grown in laboratories and then applied by surgeons. This process is lengthy and complicated, and the resulting layers of skin are highly fragile. The skin cell gun eliminates both these issues, and has already been experimented with several times and has yielded amazing results: many of the patients had little or no scarring left over from their burns!
This is a truly amazing step forward for the medical community. The amount of good this device has the capacity for is incredible, and I look forward to seeing it develop. One of the best ideas I have seen yet.
For more info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y5H9Sasq5U
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