The role of tissue engineering in the treatment of burn wounds.

Thermal injuries may cause significant damage to large areas of the skin. Extensive and deep burn wounds require specialistic therapy. The optimal method in the strategy of treating extensive, full thickness burns (III°) is the use of autologous free skin grafts of intermediate thickness (1-4). The main limitation of this method is the inadequate amount of healthy, undamaged skin (donor site), which could be used as a graft. Moreover, donor sites are an additional wound (1, 5). The areas from which the skin samples were collected for transplantation require analgesic therapy, leaving scars during the healing process (6). The above-mentioned necessitates the search for new treatment methods considering severe burn wounds, and preparations which could effectively act as skin substitutes.