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Health and Medicine

Surgery and Other Treatments

What is synthetic skin?

The material consists of a very porous collagen fiber bonded to a sugar polymer (glycoaminoglycan) obtained from shark cartilage. It is covered by a sheet of silicon rubber. It was developed by Ioannis V. Yannas (1935–) and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology around 1985. Soon after its introduction, synthetic skin was used to successfully treat more than 100 severely burned victims.



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