Author(s)

Frederick H. Silver¹, Dale DeVore², Ruchit Shah³

¹Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
²DV Consulting Services, Chelmsford, MA, USA.
³Graduate Program in Biomedical Engineering, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Allografts have been used in a variety of applications to augment as well as replace tissues throughout the body. A number of steps are involved in selection, harvesting, processing and testing of dermal allografts. Grafts can be obtained that are: free of antibodies to viruses and low in viral titers. Cellular material can be eliminated from the tissue and the product becomes almost exclusively a collagen fiber network. The purpose of this paper is to examine the changes in collagen structure and properties that occur during processing of decellularized dermis. The results indicate that collagen fiber swelling occurs during processing although the product preserves the native collagen banding pattern at the fibrillar structural level. Fiber swelling and decreased collagen deformability of processed dermis, may lead to stress concentration at the implant-tissue interface and up-regulation of mechanotransduction. This may lead to premature mechanical failure due to creation of a chronic inflammatory condition at the implant-tissue interface. It is suggested that all dermal allografts be oriented such that Langer’s lines of the implant match those of the host tissue, and that wound closure by suturing be done under conditions that preserve the normal tension in skin in order to minimize implant-interfacial failure.

Collagen, Dermis, Repair, Wound Healing, Optical Coherence Tomography, Vibrational Analysis, Resonant Frequency, Modulus, Langer’s Lines, Mechanotransduction

Silver, F. , DeVore, D. and Shah, R. (2017) Biochemical, Biophysical and Mechanical Characterization of Decellularized Dermal Implants. Materials Sciences and Applications, 8, 873-888. doi: 10.4236/msa.2017.812064.