Surgeons based at Queen Victoria Hospital, in East Grinstead, West Sussex, have been given ethical approval for the first controlled clinical studies of the technique for burns victims and children with scalds.

The treatment involves taking skin from the patient which is then made into a mesh so that it can cover a larger area. This is placed over the wound and acts as a lattice on which cultured skin cells are sprayed using an aerosol.

The technique, which removes the need for painful, disfiguring skin grafts, is being developed to treat other injuries involving significant skin loss. It is thought to speed the healing process and reduce scarring. The trials come after pilot studies involving 12 patients.

One patient, from Southsea, in Hampshire, received 90 per cent burns to his body after he was doused in petrol and set alight in 2001. By spraying skin on the wound sites, doctors were able to allow the man’s body to heal and protect it from life-threatening infection.

Phil Gilbert, a consultant plastic surgeon at Queen Victoria Hospital, said: “This technique can allow us to treat large areas of burns — covering more than 30 per cent of the body — which will be able to heal in a shorter time with fewer procedures. It will help to heal burn wounds where patients would otherwise die.We now need to quantify exactly how good this is.”

People who suffer serious burns are currently treated with skin grafts — where skin is transplanted from other areas of their body — or sheets of skin created in the laboratory. However the sheets can be difficult to handle and take weeks to culture, by which time the patient will already have begun to suffer scarring.

The “spray-on” technique is quicker to use and cheaper than sheets of cultured skin. It can be applied to areas such as the soles of feet, which are hard to graft. Skin cells have been grown in the laboratory since the mid-1970s. The “spray-on” technique, developed at Royal Perth Hospital in Australia, can not only be used for burns, but also for pigmentation abnormalities and cosmetic surgery.

In the study, 24 adults with severe burns and 50 children with scalds will undergo the “spray-on” treatment. Liz James, a cell culture scientist based at the Blond McIndoe Centre for medical research in East Grinstead, added: “We have seen miraculous results using spray-on skin.”

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