Healing the Burn: Advances in Burn Treatment Technology Aim to Save Lives, Lessen Pain and Scarring

When brothers Jamie and Glen Selby, aged 5 and 7, arrived at the Shriners Burns Institute in Denver, Colorado, in July 1983, more than 97% of their skin had been destroyed by a fire they had accidentally started while playing in an abandoned house. The boys were so badly burned that their outlook was grim-a 6-year-old friend who was also in the fire died from his injuries? But Jamie and Glen were lucky. Not only did they survive, but they were also some of the first patients to benefit from a new burn treatment nicknamed test-tube skin. Test-tube skin changed everything. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Howard Green unexpectedly discovered that he could regenerate skin cells when he failed to create a model of a rare type of mouse tumor. Green used this technique on the Selby boys, taking postage-stamp-sized squares of healthy skin from them and putting these in a special solution that allowed epithelial stem cells in the skin to replicate 10,000 fold. This expanded skin was then grafted onto the boys' wounds. The technique was lifesaving.