Massive Skin Replacement Saves Child’s Life

This article starts off talking about a boy who had escaped the war in Syria that had completely destroyed the country. He escaped with his family to go find a doctor that could treat his very rare genetic skin disease that left him with raw, blistering sores over 80% of his body. The disease is called epidermolysis bullosa. They arrived at a children's burn unit and doctors had tried everything they could to treat his skin disease, even grafting some skin from his father to see if it would heal the boy's wounds. But his body rejected this. After trying everything they found a researcher out of Italy named  Michele De Luca, and ask him for help. 

Twelve years earlier Michele De Luca, director of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia’s Center for Regenerative Medicine, had been successful in using gene therapy to replace the skin on someone's legs who had a similar condition. Unfortunately De Luca had to jump through some hoops for over a decade to be able to use his techniques on people. Finally De Luca's research and techniques were ready to be used and the little boy's doctors found De Luca at the right time. The next big hurtle for De Luca was he had never tried to replace the amount of skin the little boy had needed before. 

The doctors took a small piece of skin off of one of the only places on his body that wasn't flaming red or falling off and sent it to De Luca and his team. De Luca's team then used a virus to insert in the boys skins cells a correct copy of a gene called LAMB3. The boy had a defective copy of the gene which caused his disease. De Luca and his team grew the skin cells over scaffolds like doctors do with burn patients.  

The boy had 2 surgeries to replace all of the skin that had been affected by the defective gene LAMB3. One in October 2015 and one in November 2015. He was then was kept in University Hospitals of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany until February to make sure the boy's body accepted the new skin cells. 

A year later the boy visited De Luca's lab to show off his new skin. The boy’s epidermis, (the top layer of skin),

completely regenerated itself after the new cells were added. De Luca said “It was a quite moving moment, after this 10 years of struggling to accomplish all these rules and paperwork and bureaucracy, the moment you see a patient like this, you understand it was worth it to do it.”  His skin no longer blisters or itches, and unlike many burn patients who must apply ointment once or twice a day for the rest of their lives, his repaired skin needs no ongoing treatment. It also heals normally from cuts and bruises and now produces normal levels of the protein laminin 332, which the child had lacked from birth due to his condition. The protein is crucial for, among other things, sticking the epidermis to the underlying dermis. The boy has no scarring, because his disease was literally only skin-deep. It did not affect the deeper dermis, where cuts trigger scars.

I chose this article because it is always fun to read about a medical advance. To know how fast medical research progresses is very comforting that people put their whole lives to research that only benefits others lives. The boy who in the article who had the gene LAMB3 corrected will now live a completely normal life. He will now be able to do what he loves, all because someone spent over a decade trying and trying to let push through laws and regulations to let his research help others.