Abstract

Automation is the key for standardized, robust and cost effective regenerative medicine. To understand the potentials and challenges of automation we develop a new kind of bioreactor that allows to parallelizing and automating cell culturing for personalized medicine.

Motivation

We want to help children and support skin/cell research

Children are naive, playful, and adventurous and their curiosity can lead to an accident with severe skin burn. Nowadays, a child with a conventional skin transplant needs to be re-operated every second year. The high amount of operations is mainly due to the growth of the child and the inability of the transplanted skin to grow with it. The required technology is also applicable to adults and pharmaceutical screenings.

Today, a stamp-sized biopsy (skin probe) of the patient is sufficient to create skin grafts for transplantations. A Phase I clinical trial with a new type of bio-engineered skin graft was successfully performed at the University Children’s Hospital in Zurich. All these therapies require proliferation of the patient’s cells.

The SkinReactor is a project embedded into the SKINTEGRITY Flagship Project of the University of Medicine Zurich (Hochschulmedizin,) supervised by Prof. E. Reichmann and Prof. M. Meboldt. To produce transplantable skin equivalents in a fully automated way an efficient, robust cell proliferation system is an essential step. This is our goal.

At the moment, there are no bioreactors available which allow parallelization of cell proliferation from different patients without cross contamination. With our project, we want to simplify the process to facilitate a fast, efficient and safe treatment of burn injuries with a suitable skin transplant in the future.

Who we are

An interdisciplinary student team from Zurich, Switzerland

We are an interdisciplinary team of 7 ETH Zürich students supervised by Prof. M. Meboldt of the pd|z (Product Development Institute) as well as 2 industrial designers from the ZHdK. The goal of our project is to build a fully functional prototype.

pd|z / Focus project

Product Development Group of the ETH Zurich

During a "Focus project" at ETH Zurich teams of 3 to 8 students work during two semesters on the realization of a product. Based on market-oriented needs, all processes in product development are conducted in a realistic manner: marketing, conception, design, engineering, simulation, prototypes, and production. The SkinReactor is a research project of the product development group. The pd|z focuses on human-centered product development and forms the link between research and industry.

ZHdK

Industrial Design, Department Design

Under the leadership of Nicole Kind and Sandra Kaufmann critical designers are trained in the Bachelor Industrial Design at the Zurich University of the Arts, who can understand complex relationships and are able to contribute to innovation processes in a creative way. In this course, the proximity to industry and the focus on the three key aspects of social relevance, ecology and technology play an essential role.

SKINTEGRITY

SkinCreator is part of Skintegrity

The SkinReactor is part of the SkinCreator which itself is part of the SKINTEGRITY (University Medicine Zurich), which addresses the need for more efficient diagnosis and therapy of major skin diseases and of acute and chronic wounds. This requires a thorough understanding of the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms and the identification of biological and physical processes involved in wound repair and skin disease.