The 3D bioprinting customized skin project of Taiyuan University of Technology is seeking market-oriented financing, with the financing amount undisclosed.
3D Bioprinted Custom Skin: Taiyuan University of Technology Team Seeks Market-oriented Financing
As the largest organ of the human body, the skin is also one of the tissues most difficult to fully recover after trauma. Patients with extensive burns, chronic ulcers, diabetic foot and other conditions face not only the coverage of wounds, but also the long-term consequences of post-healing scar contracture, dysfunction and repeated infections. Traditional autologous skin transplantation requires taking skin from the patient's own donor site, which expands the wound area and is limited by the size of the available donor site; allogeneic skin and acellular matrix substitutes cannot avoid problems related to source, batch consistency and rejection reactions. In Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, a scientific research team from Taiyuan University of Technology is trying to respond to this clinical demand with an alternative approach: using the patient's own skin cells as seeds, preparing tissue-engineered skin that fits the wound through 3D bioprinting, and promoting its clinical research and industrial implementation.
From Laboratory to Bedside: The Technical Path of Custom Skin
The core of the technical route of the Taiyuan University of Technology team lies in the combination of two links: "printing" and "culturing". The team uses biocompatible hydrogels such as gelatin methacryloyl (GelMA) as the base material, combined with components such as chitosan oligosaccharide (COS) to form composite bioinks, and adopts 3D printing methods such as digital light processing (DLP) to prepare scaffolds with a biomimetic dermal structure that support cell adhesion and growth. This route has been verified in relevant studies: the scaffold has porosity, swelling rate, degradation rate and mechanical properties similar to natural tissues, and the chitosan oligosaccharide component inhibits both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, and can reduce the expression levels of fibrosis-related genes such as collagen I and collagen III in in vitro experiments.
Different from the common acellular scaffold products on the market, the key difference of the team is that it incorporates "cells" into the process. Public patent information shows that the team has deployed a preparation method for fully customized skin via 3D bioprinting, the process of which includes 3D scanning and modeling of wounds, enzymatic extraction and expansion of autologous epidermal and dermal cells from a tiny amount of skin tissue, layered printing of cell-containing scaffold structures, and in vitro culture at the air-liquid interface before transplantation. Theoretically, the finished product of this route is the patient's own tissue rather than exogenous material, and is therefore considered to be expected to reduce the risk of rejection after transplantation.
At present, the relevant achievements have moved beyond academic papers. The regenerated skin prepared by the team has been verified in mouse transplantation experiments: three-week observation and tissue section staining show that the material has good biocompatibility, and the wound healing speed and final healing effect are better than those of the blank control group. Public reports show that the team has cooperated with medical institutions such as Taigang General Hospital to prepare regenerated skin simulating patients' defective skin by printing and photopolymerization curing of cell-mixed bioinks, which is used for transplantation scenarios of patients with skin defects after culture. However, the currently available information is not sufficient to support the judgment that it has been approved for Investigational New Drug (IND) clinical trials or entered the multi-center registered clinical stage, and the team's clinical advancement pace shall be subject to the official registration information.
Treatment Demand for 30 Million People and Domestic Substitution Window
The scale of wound repair demand is the realistic support for the industrialization of this technology. Epidemiological surveys published in journals under the Chinese Medical Association show that about 100 million patients in China need wound treatment every year, of whom about 30 million have chronic non-healing surface wounds. The main cause of this group is shifting from the previous trauma type to disease types represented by diabetes and lower limb vascular lesions, with a healing rate of less than 70%. Correspondingly, the supply side is single and insufficient: according to industry statistics, the market size of China's tissue-engineered skin substitutes reached about 3.559 billion yuan in 2022, with a year-on-year increase of 8.24%. The domestic output in that year was about 11.5778 million square meters, and the apparent consumption was about 19.6202 million square meters, showing an obvious supply gap. Calculated based on the data released by Jiaofa Herui Bio, the price of domestic allogeneic cell-based tissue-engineered skin products is about 203.81 yuan per square centimeter, while the price of technical services using autologous cell culture transplantation route is about 18.35 yuan per square centimeter — the difference in price magnitude constitutes a feasible space for the technology to reach more users.
This track is not a blank market. In the international market, enterprises such as Integra and Smith & Nephew hold a high share in the high-end tissue-engineered skin field; the domestic market is home to local enterprises including Guanhao Biotech, Shanghai Songli, and Lando Biotech, whose products are mainly acellular dermis, electrospun scaffolds and other cell-free biological scaffolds. At the policy level, regenerative medicine has been included in the supported directions of the national "14th Five-Year Plan" bio-economy related plans, and cell and gene therapy products are also supported by policy tools such as the priority review channel. However, the essence of industry competition is still the accumulation of clinical evidence: whether an active tissue product can enter the clinical path depends on whether its safety, effectiveness and preparation consistency can withstand the tests of large-scale and standardized production.
Therefore, the positioning of the Taiyuan University of Technology team is not simply selling a dressing, but trying to integrate "equipment, bioink, cell process, and wound modeling" into a set of technical service solutions for hospitals. Its target users are first tertiary hospitals with concentrated burn departments and wound repair departments, as well as regional medical centers that treat patients with chronic wounds such as diabetic foot and pressure ulcers; in the medium and long term, with the establishment of standardized preparation capabilities, its application scenarios are expected to extend to fields such as plastic repair and transdermal drug testing models.
Patent Accumulation and Transformation Progress: The Next Step from Technology to Commercial Entity
Technical accumulation and team background are the most solid parts of this route at present. The team leader, Sang Shengbo, is Vice President, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor of Taiyuan University of Technology, who has long been engaged in interdisciplinary research in the fields of micro-nano biosensing and testing technology, and artificial intelligence biomedicine, with research directions clearly covering key technologies such as 3D printed regenerated skin tissue and bioprinter equipment configuration. His team has formed a systematic patent layout in this field, one of the published invention patents relates to a 3D bioprinted fully customized skin and its preparation method, with the patentee being Taiyuan University of Technology. Public information shows that the relevant team has been granted 2 US patents and 32 domestic invention patents.
The transformation actions have also been launched. Taiyuan University of Technology Technology Transfer Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Taiyuan University of Technology, as an exclusive platform for the transformation of the university's scientific research achievements, has connected with market investment fund institutions for the project "Clinical Research and Transformation Application of Non-rejection Regenerated Skin Technology", assisted the scientific research team in sorting out technical advantages, clinical progress and commercialization implementation paths, and built a communication channel between the scientific research team and market-oriented capital. This action indicates that the project is transitioning from an in-school scientific research achievement to industrialization and market-oriented financing.
However, the challenges ahead are equally specific. The first is regulation: tissue-engineered skin products containing living cell components face a long review and quality system construction cycle in China, and the requirements for clinical evidence are much higher than those for traditional medical dressings. The second is large-scale production: the autologous cell source means the preparation logic of "one batch for one patient", and how to control the cost and cycle while ensuring batch consistency is an unavoidable threshold for commercialization. The third is industrial undertaking: there is no confirmable industrial company entity and details of this round of financing in public channels at present. Whether the team can take over the patent license and subsequent financing with an appropriate corporate structure will directly affect the transformation efficiency.
For the next stage, the team plans to invest the raised funds in the in-depth advancement of clinical research, standardized mass production of bioprinting equipment and bioinks, and the construction of hospital-side technical service centers. In the segmented market of skin defect treatment with stable demand and insufficient domestic supply, whether 3D bioprinted custom skin can grow from a laboratory technology to a replicable clinical solution depends on whether it can translate the technical advantages of "autologous, fitting and repairable" into stable preparation capabilities, clear clinical evidence and product forms that can enter the hospital procurement process.