Cellular Approaches to Tissue-Engineering of Skin: A Review

Abstract

The human skin is a complex organ consisting of multiple skin cells that work together to complement each other and provide essential functions such as skin barrier function, skin homeostasis and protection against the harmful ultraviolet radiation. Understanding the roles and paracrine signaling of different skin cells plus the influence of external stimuli on them are crucial towards the design of tissue-engineered skin constructs as these factors regulate the cellular behavior such as cell proliferation, migration and differentiation. Hence, an in-depth understanding of the knowledge on the epithelial-mesenchymal interactions would be valuable towards the design of a tissue-engineered skin construct.