Closer to Reality: Testing Improvements in Synthetic Skin

By Jessica Orwig

New research suggests that currently available types of synthetic skin may now be good enough to imitate animal skin in laboratory tests and may truly simulate human skin in the future.

The findings have implications for the treatment of burn victims. When a person’s body is severely burned, he or she may not have enough healthy skin remaining to use for healing the burns through skin cell regeneration. In this case, synthetic skin or animal skin provides a potential substitute. But the use of animal skin comes with a variety of problems.

“In addition to ethical issues, animal skin is hard to obtain, expensive and gives highly variable results because of individual skin variability,” says Bharat Bhushan, Ohio Eminent Scholar and the Howard D. Winbigler Professor of mechanical engineering, who is conducting the synthetic skin studies. But, synthetic skin’s composition is consistent, making it a more reliable product.”

To study the behavior of synthetic skin, Bhushan uses his expertise in measuring effects on tiny scales, such as a nanometer, or billionth of a meter.

“Cellular events, like the effective and accurate delivery of drugs and the absorption of skincare products — these things occur at the nanoscale,” explains Bhushan.

Using a highly sensitive atomic force microscope to view results on a scale of about 100 nanometers, Bhushan and his colleague Wei Tang, an engineer at China University of Mining and Technology, compared the effects of a generic skin cream applied to synthetic skin and rat skin. They determined that two different types of synthetic skin — one commercially available and one produced in Bhushan’s lab — reacted similarly to the rat skin.

“The skin cream reduced the surface roughness, increased the skin’s ability to absorb moisture from the environment and softened the skin surface,” says Bhushan.

Whether a synthetic skin feels and acts like real skin is very important, Bhushan explains. The skin must stand up to environmental effects such as sunlight or rain while maintaining its texture and consistency. Scientists have continued to improve the practical and aesthetic properties of synthetic skin, which suggests it may soon be ready to replace animal skin and, in the future, human skin.

“Right now, our main concern is to determine whether the synthetic skin behaves like any real skin,” says Bhushan, who is working to improve testing methods for measuring certain properties such as surface roughness and to test different skin cream. “Then, scientists can go on to more complex problems like modeling synthetic products that behave exactly like human skin.”

_{Jessica Orwig is a science writing intern for University Research Communications.}