For some perspective on why this matters. If you've never had a serious skin issue it's hard to understand how traumatic it is. I had basal cell carcinoma (a treatable skin cancer) in my early 30's on my nose. The treatment was careful excision of flesh from the affected area. The thing you can't prepare yourself for is how much and how deep the necessary removal is. Imagine a stack of 5 dimes taken out of your nose, and in it's place, a dark and gaping hole.
It is impossible to look at oneself in the mirror without a sense of revulsion and horror. It then takes months of careful wound care for flesh to regrow. My case was simple, and I healed as quickly as could be expected. Most people who need skin grafts are not so lucky.
I sincerely hope this technology is proven effective and makes its way out to the real world as soon as possible.
I have skin grafts on ~30% of my body and donor sites on another large fraction (although not on the face). I’d be pretty excited about skin grafts that actually looked decent.
It’s tricky though, since there is an uncanny valley: if it doesn’t look natural, it might just look inexplicably weird (think mismatched hair). I’ve felt this way about some of the more modern techniques for large full thickness grafts I’ve seen photos of. Partial thickness grafts have the advantage of being unambiguous (but obviously unnatural looking).
Even if it would be possible to “fix” my issues with whatever we develop in the next n years, it definitely won’t be worth redoing it. I wouldn’t wish skin grafts on my worst enemy. Fortunately, I was young enough not to remember the first time around.
I agree that 3d printing is potentially of value for tissue engineering, however in this case the printed tissue is functionally no different from a full thickness skin graft which is used routinely for reconstruction of nasal defects and has significant limitations e.g. inability to reconstruct a deeper defect and colour/texture mismatch.
Boardwalk Empire expanded upon this quite a bit with one of the characters who loses part of his face in the war. That's one part of Television I like.
It is impossible to look at oneself in the mirror without a sense of revulsion and horror. It then takes months of careful wound care for flesh to regrow. My case was simple, and I healed as quickly as could be expected. Most people who need skin grafts are not so lucky.
I sincerely hope this technology is proven effective and makes its way out to the real world as soon as possible.