
The Handheld Device That Paints New Skin: How a 2-Kilogram Bioprinter Could Make Burn Centers Obsolete
On the third floor of the Stanford University School of Medicine, a team of bioengineers has built a machine that sounds like science fiction and looks like a hot glue gun. It weighs less than 2 kilograms. It fits in a paramedic's backpack. It uses living human cells—fibroblasts, keratinocytes, the building blocks of skin—as its ink. And it prints new skin directly onto wounds, layer by layer, without grafts, without donors, without the painful, scarring, months-long process that has been the standard of care for severe burns and deep wounds since the invention of the skin graft in the 19th century.








