SkIN Canada researchers met together on June 23-24 during the Canadian Dermatology Association meeting in Québec City. For this occasion, SkIN Canada Managing Director Professor An-Wen Chan delivered a talk at the LOEX (Laboratoire d’Organogenèse EXpérimentale), a center of excellence of Université Laval, located at the Centre de Recherche du CHU de Québec-Université Laval.

The presentation entitled “Increasing value and reducing waste: Addressing the burden of inaccessible research” was highly stimulating and discussed how most information about the methods and results of health research remains inaccessible to researchers, patients, healthcare providers, and policymakers. Professor Chan presented evidence of the substantial societal impact of this problem and highlighted key global solutions to improve access to information on research protocols and results.

Rachael Manion, Co-Director of SkIN Canada and Executive Director of the Canadian Skin Patient Alliance, also joined for a visit of the LOEX installations, which house three suites of clean rooms. The LOEX is internationally recognized for the innovative method to engineer tissues in vitro named the “self-assembly approach”. This breakthrough technology, first applied to the reconstruction of skin, has expanded to the engineering a variety of living human tissues (i.e., cornea, heart valves, adipose, urologic and nerve tissues). The LOEX researchers and their teams strive to develop definitive personalized treatments with replacement tissues that will not be rejected because of their production from patients’ own cells. The LOEX is the only Canadian laboratory that has begun clinical trials with living tissue constructs produced in vitro and transplanted in humans with long-term persistence in mind. The LOEX has already initiated four clinical trials: three first-in-human early phase clinical trials (Phase I/II) with a self-assembled skin substitute (SASS) and another trial with cultured epithelium corneal autografts (CECA). The initial results obtained with the SASS show that it persists after grafting on burn patients (8.4 years follow-up).