German scientists grow artificial skin using cells from babies'

German scientists have created a machine that manufactures human skin using cells from a baby boy’s foreskin.

The scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute hope the skin they’ve been able to produce will provide a humane alternative to using animals in testing of cosmetics and other products, a German news service, the Deutsche Presse Agentur, reported.

The machine has been dubbed the “Skin Factory.” It is about 22 feet long, 10 feet tall and 10 feet wide. It fosters the growth of skin samples from cells extracted from foreskins of boys 4 years-old or younger who are circumcised.

Before a child’s foreskin was contributed to the project, their parents provided the scientists with permission, according to Germany’s Suedkurier newspaper.

Foreskins were not used by the scientists merely because they were a source of excess human skin cells.

“The older one gets, the worse the cells function,” engineer Andreas Traube told the DPA.

“It's also important that the cells come from as uniform a source as possible, in order to avoid abnormalities in the production of new skin.”

The scientists are also looking into using stem cells as a source for skin production.

After the cells from the foreskins have multiplied inside the machine, they’re injected into a gel that forces them to grow into a sheet that simulates the epidermis — the outermost layer of human skin. To create a model that simulates human skin, three of these layers are fused together, according to the Suedkurier.

The process of growing new skin takes about six weeks. At present, the Fraunhofer Institute is producing about 5,000 new samples per month, the DPA reported.

For their next project, the scientists are working on reproducing the human cornea.

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