Papers of the Week

Prominent clinical problems related to the skin-nerve interface include barrier dysfunction and erythema but it is the symptoms of pain and itch that lead patients to seek medical treatment. Tissue-engineered innervated skin models provide an excellent solution for studying the mechanisms underlying neuro-cutaneous disorders for drug screening, and cutaneous device development. Innervated skin substitutes provide solutions to the traditional monolayer cultures and have advantages that make them preferable to animal studies for certain applications, such as measuring somatosensation. The tissue-engineered innervated skin models replicate the complex stratified epidermis that provides barrier function in native skin, a feature that is lacking in monolayer co-cultures, while allowing for measurement of nerve function that cannot be achieved in animal models. In this review, the advantages and disadvantages of different cell sources and scaffold materials will be discussed and a presentation of the current state of the field is reviewed.