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The Fibers & Polymers Laboratory was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1966 by Prof. Ioannis V. Yannas, Professor of Polymer Science and Technology. It was the site of discovery for what became known as "artificial skin", the first scaffold with proven regenerative activity. The laboratory is currently affiliated with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Discovery of induced regeneration of organs in adults. Synthesis of the first biologically active scaffold.

In the 1970s it was discovered in this lab that the dermis, the inner tissue layer of skin, could be regenerated (synthesized in vivo) in adult animals and later in humans. Regeneration was induced using a highly porous scaffold synthesized as a graft copolymer of type I collagen and chondroitin 6-sulfate, a glycosaminoglycan.

The discovery of dermis regeneration marked the first time that an adult tissue that does not regenerate spontaneously could be induced to regenerate. Although the mammalian fetus generally can regenerate injured organs spontaneously, adults mammals do not. When this scaffold was seeded with an appropriate density of epidermal cells from the patient (extracted from a very small biopsy of the epidermis), regeneration both of a dermis and an epidermis occurred simultaneously in about 18 days over very large areas of the body. An almost perfect new skin (skin appendages were missing) could therefore be synthesized in vivo at will without using skin grafts from the patient or from other donors. This discovery initially became known as "artificial skin".

This development of the middle 1970s and early 1980s is believed to be the first time that a scaffold, a highly porous macromolecular network optionally seeded with cells, induced synthesis of an organ, and marks the earliest years of the field that eventually, in the middle to late 1980s, became known as Tissue Engineering.

Today the members of the Fibers & Polymers Laboratory design and synthesize biologically active scaffolds for organ regeneration. Further details of our current work can be found in the Research section of this site.

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