engraft

In the case of extensive wounds, however, it can be challenging to harvest enough donor skin, and generating artificial skin substitutes that include hair follicles and sweat glands and can engraft on deep wounds has not been successful.

However, since C. acnes seems an attractive synthetic biology chassis for treating skin diseases due to its niche environment deep inside hair follicles -practically where sebum is released-, its importance for skin homeostasis, its close contact to relevant therapeutic targets, plus the fact that it has been shown to successfully engraft when applied to human skin, led them to insist on editing the genome of this non-engineerable bacterium.

When applied to the skin of mice -the only animal model able to test engineered bacteria to date- they engraft, live and produce the protein.

However, after tens of thousands transplants, little was known about which donor strains provide long-term engraftment, and which engraft early after the transplant.

Jimi also needed chemotherapy to kill off existing cells in his bone marrow so that his edited stem cells would have room to engraft and grow.