Cutting-edge technology for skin

ETH Pioneer Fellows Marcel Gort and Manuel Heckhorn of RapidGraft developed “TeD” – an innovative Tissue engineering Dermatome. It helps extracting skin samples three times faster and furthermore much safer.

TeD device (picture by Sonja Frey)
TeD device (picture by Sonja Frey)

Marcel and Manuel, who will be using your TeD device?

The targeted user group are dermatologists and plastic surgeons. Taking split skin (upper part of the skin) grafts is today almost exclusively done by surgeons. We envision shifting this more towards outpatient treatment by dermatologists for the lighter cases, where only small split skin grafts are needed and thus making the whole treatment more efficient, in terms of costs and time.

Initially TeD was designed for tissue engineering – technologies using patient’s own skin cells to bio-engineer products for a better treatment. Today it is already possible to grow a large patch of skin in the lab to cover large wounds such as heavy burns. All it takes is a small split skin sample from a healthy body part of the patient, which can be extracted with TeD.

However, there are more applications where small split skin grafts come in handy ranging from covering chronic wounds to testing cosmetics in the lab.

Split skin includes cells from the epidermis and the dermis.
Split skin includes cells from the epidermis and the dermis (picture: Rapid Graft)

What is special about TeD compared to existing solutions?

The main difference is the simplicity of the process with TeD. The whole idea of TeD is to make skin grafting so easy that basically anyone could do it. We developed a three-step process of sticking a pad on the donor’s skin, putting the device (TeD) on the pad and then finally pressing a button to cut. That’s it.

This makes it faster, more reliable and cheaper. Because it is so easy and minimally invasive, there is no need for assistance and it no longer requires an operating room. It can be simply done in any doctor’s practice.

3 steps, to get split skin (pictures by Sonja Frey)
3 steps, to get split skin (pictures by Sonja Frey)

What advantages does this bring for surgeons, doctors and patients?

The main interest is clearly the benefit for the patients: We hope that with our TeD more patients could benefit from a treatment with split skin or with tissue engineered products. Furthermore, the intervention to get the small skin sample is much faster and more convenient for the patient since they do not need to go into an operating room to cut the skin sample and the actual cutting takes less than a second.

For the dermatologists it brings the advantage that they can offer new treatments, since until now there are no tools to cut split skin grafts. The process is very fast and allows them to treat more patients in the same amount of time. This increases their profit, benefiting both dermatologists and plastic surgeons.

Finally, TeD should deliver more exact and repeatable results when it comes to thickness and area of the graft. This is an advantage for labs and companies working on tissue engineered products, especially when it comes to automation. By automating the cell isolation and cultivation, their processes become faster and less labor intensive, which is crucial in order to establish these technologies. To achieve this, the quality of the skin samples must be standardized. This is not the case today, since the quality relies very much on the skills of the surgeon cutting the skin. This problem would be solved with TeD.

What are your goals for next year?

Our goal for next year is that TeD can be used in labs for research purposes. In the long term our vision is that our technology, originally developed for tissue engineering, becomes widely accessible for a variety of applications. After founding our company we need to find investors and business partners to turn that vision into reality within the next three years.

Pioneer Fellows Manuel Heckhorn Ghilardi (left) and Marcel Gort (right), both from ETH department of Mechanical and Process Engineering formed a team to turn basic research into a successful company.
Pioneer Fellows Manuel Heckhorn Ghilardi (left) and Marcel Gort (right), both from ETH department of Mechanical and Process Engineering formed a team to turn basic research into a successful company.

Contact / Links:

external pagewww.rapidgraft.ch

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