It’s a skin gun. Literally. The name isn’t some clever marketing ploy or cheeky metaphor. Googling it won’t surprise you with sixty-four pages of questionable content. Neither is it the curious, Southern cousin of the Flesh Light, the Googling of which should be severely dissuaded until you find yourself in a position to fully peruse all sixty-four pages at your leisure. It is, however, a ray of hope for people facing months of painful burn therapy and skin grafts, not to mention an awesome band name.
(Video after the jump)
(Video after the jump)
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| “We are Skin Gun! Groupies queue to the left.” (P.S. Not really Skin Gun) |
Developed by Jörg C. Gerlach and colleagues at Stem Cell Systems GmbH in Berlin, the concept is so ball-blastingly brazen that it’s no wonder the Internet has been flooded with hoax accusations. Skin stem cells are disseminated into a saline solution and then… just kinda sprayed onto the wound. Simple. Twenty years of medical study and experience and there are probably nineteen-year-old skaters haunting the City Bowl train tracks who are more qualified to operate this equipment than the scientists who invented it.
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| Sick Tagz, Brah. |
A computer ensures that the cells are evenly distributed and an artificial capillary system is attached to keep the new skin alive for all of the four fucking days it takes for the skin to heal. Holly hell. I’ve known people to take longer getting over the flu. It takes a few more months for the pigment to return to the skin, but after that, hey presto! No one will ever guess you were anywhere near that burning crib.
The technique only works for second-degree burns. Third-degrees are beyond its reach and the tech is considered too expensive to deal with first-degree burns that should heal suitably by themselves. As of the end of 2011, this equipment and technique were still in the experimental phase, neither having received FDA approval. There is also concern as to the long-term effects of the procedure, as there is no definitive way to predict how the stem cells might mutate. I take this to mean that, a few months right now, the fellow in the video below is going to wake up to discover a fresh pair of earlobes straddling his shoulder.
So there it is. We’re one step closer to Star Trek and their insta-heal gizmos. And heck, even if something goes horribly wrong and the twelve test subjects who have so far opted for the procedure find themselves warped into hideous murder machines by their rapidly mutating fetus skin (pretty much ensuring that the procedure will never receive its FDA approval – stupid cannibal mutants) at least we’ll still have a gun that spray-paints skin! The possibilities are endless…
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| And horrifying |
Click here for some graphs and whatnot.
1 comment:
The device is not a hoax but the video is a dramatization that greatly exaggerates the results achieved so far. According to the NIH, the objective of this research is presently limited to understanding how--or even if--stem cells become differentiated tissue when applied in this way. No clinical trials have been done. No results have been published. This a _possible_ future application of stem cells, not a burn treatment that currently exists. That is not to say that this is bogus research or that there is not good progress being made in this field--just that the video is entirely misleading. The synthetic scaffolding that they apply over the wound in these experiments is actually much more amazing biotechnology than the airbrush that applies the precursor cells. It contains a network of tiny arteries and veins that supply oxygen, nutrients and antibiotics to the tissue underneath.
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