[yanowitz]

This seems super cool but is this like battery breakthroughs? Don’t get excited until we are much closer to it being manufactured at scale/appearing in clinical settings? This is a real question—I’m not clear on the significance of these kinds of press releases.

[samus]

The challenge with new battery technology is that they have to compete with mature existing technologies and their optimized manufacturing pipelines.

This breakthrough though has no real competition so far. The alternatives are skin transplants, either from one's own body (good compatibility, but limited availability) or from tissue donors (the usual immune system compatibility issues). And TA indicates that the results of those are far from perfect.

The technology also builds on multiple technologies that have been developing for some decades now, for example 3D printing of cells. It also finds applications for other tissues and organs of simple enough structure. Skin is fairly complex, therefore this breakthrough is significant.

The only issue I see are the usual regulatory overhead before it can be rolled out.

[fatfingerd]

It seems kind of crazy to me that they've jumped so quickly to full skin layers.

From examples where people heal without scarring like in minor wounds, it always seemed to me like a goo of accepted but useless cells frequently replaced would be sufficient to confuse where scar tissue should form while gradual healing from adjacent skin eventually occurred.