Project Overview

The depth of burn injury in skin determines the regenerative capacity of the wound. There are no reproducible models of burn injury with a consistent depth of injury in human skin samples. Testing of new clinical therapeutics is limited to expensive and time consuming clinical trials or trial and error of already approved products on patients. We are developing an ex-vivo model of burn wounds on human skin (discarded from elective plastic surgery cases) to provide a platform to test new therapeutics for wound healing.
We can recreate various depths of burn injury using electrocautery, scald, and contact methods to generate thermal burns to human skin. We are looking to develop a stamping method that utilizes liquid or metal that can be heated to a specified temperature to generate a burn injury on contact with the skin for a specified period of time and pressure. The goal is to generate a burn injury of consistent depth which is based upon temperature, length of contact and pressure.
Ideally, the stamp used to create the injury would include multiple contact points to generate replicate burn injuries from the same 100 sq cm piece of skin.
We have the methods in our laboratory to analyze the depth of the burn, therefore the generation of the tool to generate the burn is the focus of this project.

Team Picture

Contact Information

Team Members

• Alexander Babinski - Team Leader
• Gabriela Betancourt - Communicator
• Adrian Omidfar - BSAC
• Scott Schulz - BWIG
• Samuel Crowell - Co-BPAG
• Sindhu Battula - Co-BPAG

Advisor and Client

• Dr. Kristyn Masters - Advisor
• Dr. Angela Gibson - Client