Ardeshir Bayat

Imagine a house with all the furniture and people taken out — you're left with an empty shell that is easier to populate than just building a house from scratch, in the same way, decellularized dermis provides a scaffold that the body can try to populate with its own cells. The good thing about decellularized dermis is that it has a structure and composition that the human body is already used to — the body responds more favorably to what it is used to than what it isn't.

We had a patient, a 92-year-old lady, who had a skin ulcer for 20 years, even after getting treated with various dressings, after we treated her with decellularized dermis, she healed within four weeks.

A chronic wound is one that has not healed for six to eight weeks, or in some cases years, no matter how many dressings are placed on them.

You can try and re-engineer human skin, but the holy grail of skin substitutes would be to get something as beautiful and perfect as what the human body has already created.

The skin is the largest organ in the human body, and the skin we work with is just like any other organ donated by people.