Healing of full thickness wounds, such as burn wounds, is still complicated by (hypertrophic) scar formation and contraction. Standard treatment is transplantation with autologous split thickness skin graft. In extended burns the grafts have to be widely meshed because of limited donor sites. This often results in a poor functional and cosmetic outcome.
In the past decades several dermal substitutes which improve wound healing have be become available to the clinic, however scarless healing has still not been achieved. The addition of cells seems to be the next step in tissue engineering of skin substitutes.
Adult stem cells are a promising source for this purpose. Different stem cell niches have been identified in the skin: e.g. mesenchymal stem cells reside in the subcutaneous fat, the basal layer of the epidermis contain the epidermal stem cells and hair follicles contain several niches for different stem cell populations. In this presentation the characteristics of different stem cell populations and their potential for skin tissue engineering will be evaluated.