The "holy grail" of burns treatment is much closer to becoming a reality, with lab-grown skin successfully used on an Australian patient in a clinical trial.
Patients with severe burns usually need skin grafts, which involves taking healthy unburnt skin from other "donor" parts of the body and using it to cover damaged areas.
But in the trial a man's extensive burns were treated using skin grown from his own skin cells, which were then placed on his body and started healing over within days.
Scientists hope the breakthrough will replace the painful graft procedure and significantly improve outcomes for patients, according to Alfred Hospital reconstructive plastic surgeon Associate Professor Heather Cleland.
She said about half of all burns survivors had pain or disability due to scars or infection, which was made even worse by skin grafts, but their new technique was practical and safe.
"This is starting to look like ultimate success, which is a split skin graft equivalent for people with severe burns," she told AAP.
"It will be a life-saving treatment for some people who are very short of donor sites."
The sheets of skin, which measuring about 10cm by 10cm, take about four weeks to grow in a process that involves isolating a patient's cells, waiting for them to grow 100 times bigger and form new skin.
Assoc Prof Cleland said it was a highly complex process that she and her colleagues had worked on for a decade, with work beginning in other labs in the 1970s.
The man involved is the first of 10 patients included in a phase one clinical trial being run by Alfred Health and Monash University, which is funded by the Medical Research Future Funds.
Assoc Prof Cleland was happy with the results, saying the lab-grown skin had attached to his body in just five days.
The trial is yet to recruit the remaining nine patients but each must have deep, severe burns to at least 20 per cent of their skin, equivalent to an entire leg.
Monash University Adjunct Associate Professor Shiva Akbarzadeh said it could also reduce long-term scarring, which could be painful, itchy or cause patients to lose function.
"By harnessing the body's natural wound-repair mechanisms, we expect little scarring of the treated sites long term," she said.
While the scientists are focused on the trial, they are working on scaling up skin production so it can be used on more patients, along with modifications to thickness and pigmentation.
"We're much better at getting people to survive but there's a long way to go with the scarring problem and we think that the answer to it really lies in bioengineered skin substitutes," Assoc Prof Cleland said.
"This product that we've got the very promising not only is a life-saving manoeuvre in a small group of severely burned patients, but also in terms of improving their long-term outcomes."
