Tissue Therapies' Vitro-Gro heals burns without scarring

Brisbane's Tissue Therapies (ASX:TIS) announced today that trials of its Vitro-Gro wound-healing technology at the Royal Children's Hospital show it not only accelerates the healing of serious burns, but leaves no scarring.

The company trialled the therapy in animals at the RCH's Children's Burns Unit, under the supervision of its CSO, Ass Prof Zee Upton, head of the tissue bioregeneration and integration program at Queensland University of Technology. Human trials will are due to begin next year.

CEO Dr Steven Mercer said, "This was quite a small study, and we didn't expect to produce this significant result.

"It demonstrates that the therapy is extremely powerful, just as Zee Upton predicted it would be. And it gives us a solid technology base for a much broader range of uses, in any application involving live mammalian cells."

Mercer said the study demonstrate that children who had suffered partial-thickness burns who healed within two to three weeks did not develop scarring.

The collaborative project with the RCH related specifically to partial-thickness burns in children, which Mercer said could have "devastating consequences" if they failed to heal quickly.

The VitroGro protein complexes used to accelerate wound healing substantially accelerated wound healing, while reducing the formation of the inflammatory tissues that produce scarring.

Mercer said the technology should also work in any age group, and on different wound types. It could also be used accelerate healing and reduce scarring in full-thickness burns or wounds requiring skin grafts, and was a "good prospect" for wound healing in cosmetic therapies.

The VitroGro platform technology consists of different formulations of cocktails of cellular growth factors including fibroblast growth factor (FGF), insulin-like growth factor (IGF) epidermal growth factor (EGF) and TGF-beta. The formula can be varied to stimulate the growth of a variety of cell types in bioreactors, to produce pharmaceutical products such as cell-growth compounds, and antigens for anti-viral vaccines.

Artificial skin

"We also have a project under way with an international cosmetic company to develop a live cell culture system to test cosmetics," Mercer said.

"European legislation due to come into effect in 2007 will ban the testing of cosmetics in animals, so they're looking to develop an artificial skin that can be maintained in culture."