Gene therapy: A Novel Approach in Skin Regenerative Medicine

Because of ease accessibility, the wound healing microenvironment provides an ideal environment for targeted gene therapy. In addition, high cell turnover and active cellular proliferation may cause perfect conditions for gene delivery methods. Therefore, functional therapies including gene replacement, gene editing, RNA targeting, and harnessing natural gene therapy may represent major advances in wound healing and repair caused by genetic skin diseases. In a recent clinical experiment, the combination of gene therapy and stem cell therapy enhanced the survival of a child’s bearing Junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB) disease. In this study, ex vivo cultivated stem cells which underwent retroviral transduction of LAMB3 cDNA were grafted to the patient. By passing 2 years, the transplanted skin is currently stable and shows no sign of deleterious effects or blistering.Furthermore, gene editing technologies such as the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) system opens promising avenue in constructive medicine. CRISPR system have been shown the potencyin repair of cutaneous wounds, regeneration of bone, cartilage, nerve, and muscle. Animal studies have shown the efficacy of gene therapy for tendon repairing via expression of various growth factors, or bone morphogenic proteins. In addition, impeding transforming growth factor beta-1 has prevented tendon adhesions. Hence, multiplexing these multiple growth factors using CRISPR may synergistic effect on the tendon repair enhancement.This review show the potential of gene therapy approaches in skin regenerative medicine and needs to introduce as an approach in advanced therapies in clinic.