Abstract
Skin wounds are immense medical and socioeconomic burdens, and autologous skin grafting remains the gold standard for wound repair. We recently found that full-thickness micro skin tissue columns (MSTCs) can be harvested with minimal donor site morbidity, and that MSTCs applied to wounds “randomly” (without maintaining their natural epidermal-dermal orientation) can accelerate re-epithelialization. However, despite MSTCs containing all the cellular and extracellular contents of full-thickness skin, normal dermal architecture was not restored by random MSTCs. In this study, we developed a magnetically induced assembly method to produce constructs of densely packed, oriented MSTCs that closely resemble the overall architecture of full-thickness skin to test the hypothesis that maintaining MSTCs’ orientation could further hasten healing and restore a normal dermis. Our method led to faster and more orderly re-epithelialization but unexpectedly did not improve the retention of dermal architecture, which reveals a hitherto unappreciated role for tissue morphology in determining dermal remodeling outcomes.