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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 20 2015, @10:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-would-you-like-your-skin-sir? dept.

Cosmetics manufacturer L'Oréal is teaming up with bioengineering start-up Organovo to begin 3D-printing human skin. L'Oréal already grows human skin samples:

L'Oréal currently grows skin samples from tissues donated by plastic surgery patients. It produces more than 100,000, 0.5 sq cm skin samples per year and grows nine varieties across all ages and ethnicities.

Its statement explaining the advantage of printing skin, offered little detail: "Our partnership will not only bring about new advanced in vitro methods for evaluating product safety and performance, but the potential for where this new field of technology and research can take us is boundless."

Organovo has previously offered 3D-printed liver tissue for researchers and pharmaceutical companies:

"It was unclear how liver-like the liver structures were," said Alan Faulkner-Jones, a bioengineering research scientist at Heriot Watt university. Printing skin could be a different proposition, he thinks. "Skin is quite easy to print because it is a layered structure," he told the BBC. "The advantages for the cosmetics industry would be that it doesn't have to test products on animals and will get a better response from human skin."

But printed skin has more value in a medical scenario, he thinks. "It would be a great thing to have stores of spare skins for burn victims."

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @12:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @12:02AM (#185807)

    .. they taste like chicken ..