The Tilley Burn Centre at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto teamed up with researchers from the University of Toronto to create something revolutionary. "I actually find it kind of fish-tanky," Dr. Marc Jeschke told CBS News, but the skin printing prototype could change things for burn victims and wounded soldiers.
"It's cutting edge," Jeschke told CBS News. "We can mimic how your skin looks. And that's the evolvement, that's something new, that's something novel."
First, skin cells are taken from the burn victim - less skin needs to be harvested than with traditional skin graft methods. "We grow these cells in various containers and make them exactly into the cell type that we want ... the printer tells the cells where to go," Jeschke explained.
Then, a cartridge weaves the cells together with a gel that creates 3-D "scaffolding."
"You basically imprint your various cells into this three-dimensional matrix that comes out and it's basically ready to be put on the patient," Jeschke said.
The printer is still in the trial stage, but the technology could be put to real world use within five years. Jeschke said they need more money for this to happen.
"In September, members of the team were selected as the Canadian winners of the 2014 James Dyson Award, a prestigious international engineering prize that comes with cash, but only a fraction of what it will cost to get the project across the finish line," according to CBS News.
