Coverage of full skin thickness burns with allograft inoculated with autogenous epithelial cells

Since the supply of unburned autograft skin may be insufficient to cover very extensive burns, we have prepared allograft skin inoculated with a suspension of uncultured autogenous epithelial cells and grafted this material on to full skin thickness loss wounds. There was a satisfactory 'take' and permanent healing of this mixture of heterogeneous dermis and autogenous epidermis in two out of four patients. In this preliminary report we describe the clinical and histological observations which indicate that in the two patients with successful graft 'take' the epithelial cells proliferated and formed a continuous pale-coloured layer on top of the heterogeneous dermis between 30 and 40 days after application.