Porcine Skin

Porcine skin serves as a proven model translatable to human skin. We use portions of skin from pigs destined for human consumption either large pieces of whole skin or explants to test your experimental therapeutics in a cost-effective manner.

  • Porcine skin arrives at our facility 1-4 hours after slaughter from pigs raised for human consumption. We experiment on the prepared skin in large sections or as small biopsies grown in transwells. Therapeutics under investigation are applied to the skin before or after the biopsies have been harvested. We measure the effects of your products on either the natural flora of the pig or a known human pathogen seeded onto the skin.   
  • Explants are used to test the cellular toxicity and antimicrobial properties of your products.
  • We also simulate a wound in the skin by means of incision or removal of part of the epidermis and dermis

Relevant Therapeutic Areas

Wound Care

Learn how ex vivo tissue models, in conjunction with multiplex assays, can shed light on wound-healing processes.

Porcine skin serves as a relevant model for wound care. The skin has comparable thickness, hair follicle density, and wound closure via reepithelialization.

By engineering wounds in our human skin model, we can investigate the wound-healing capabilities of your formulations by performing large screens of analytes predictive of wound healing in conjunction with histology.

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Inflammation and Biocompatibility

Learn how we can measure the inflammatory response of tissue to your experimental compounds.

The PMM offers a unique way to investigate inflammatory cytokine concentrations in a cost-effective manner. We can perform ELISAs and multiplex assays to determine whether experimental compounds are pro- or anti-inflammatory.

We use our porcine skin model to study inflammation by testing the tissue for known biomarkers associated with inflammatory processes. We can apply experimental formulations onto large or small areas of skin and then harvest uniformly sized explants with a biopsy punch. These explants are analyzed for inflammatory cytokine production.

Our human skin model is an excellent way to examine the influence of your experimental product on inflammation. Our wounded or intact human skin models will help determine whether your compounds have pro- or anti-inflammatory properties.

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Infectious Diseases

Find out how our customizable infectious disease models will help accelerate your preclinical testing to achieve your goals in a cost-effective manner.

Mucosal tissue is an ideal environment for microbial growth, making the PMM an excellent application for testing the efficacy of products to treat infectious disease pathogens. We can test for efficacy against planktonic and biofilm infections with this model.

Porcine skin testing is commonly used to test formulations or compounds that are applied to the skin (e.g., presurgical products). We can track efficacy against host flora or seed the skin with known pathogens and track how they respond to the compound. We can apply this testing to large or small areas of skin.

Our reactors serve as a testing platform for drugs and devices intended to inhibit biofilm formation on abiotic surfaces. We can determine whether or not, and to what degree, bacteria form biofilms in the presence of your materials.

Using our human skin model, we can perform research on known human pathogens. The most common organisms we use are methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Acinetobacter baumannii. Infections can be planktonic or biofilm.

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