Personalized Skin from the Lab
Dr. Daniela Marino, CEO and Co-Founder of CUTISS AG
Skin is our largest organ. Every year more than 50 million people suffer from skin defects and need skin transplants to restore skin function. Unfortunately, standards of care are often lacking and ineffective, leaving patients with scars. Scars are disfiguring but also highly discomfiting, they can impair growth and movement and require serial surgeries and intense homecare. Often, psychosocial rehabilitation is also required. CUTISS can now offer a solution: Personalized, bioengineered skin grafts that can be produced in large quantities from a small biopsy and that due their biological characteristics will minimally scar after transplantation. Burn victims and other patients in need of new skin could now finally have another option. Clinical validation of the new technique is currently in phase II, but more work will be needed to reach out to patients. We are therefore already working upscaling and converting the manual production process into an automated one. denovoSkin, our first product in development, is envisioned to be the first-ever automatically produced personalized skin tissue therapy: Safe, effective and accessible.