Considering that many severe trauma patients may not have enough donor sites to graft from, the patients that need it the most suffer the most adversely from suboptimal treatment and scarring.

A burn wound that takes more than 21 days to heal has a 70% chance of developing a hypertrophic scar compared with a 4% risk for one that heals in less than 10 days. It’s for this reason that though conventional culture can grow the patients keratinocytes to arbitrary size, it is a mediocre choice for treating severe burns. 

Dr. Wood noticed that pre-confluent cultured keratinocytes healed burns better and with less scarring. Combining this with an aerosolized delivery system allowed cell suspensions to be delivered evenly to larger wounds or burns for better healing.

CellSpray takes 5 days of culturing compared to 21 days of conventional skin culture and can be expanded from a donor site the size of a postage stamp.

The related ReCell technique uses aerosol delivery, but biopsy and grafting are done within the same surgical operation.

These techniques aim to treat severe burns within a timeline that minimizes hypertrophic scarring.