3D Artificial Skin Platform for Investigating Pregnancy-Related Skin Pigmentation

Abstract

In this study, we created a 3D Artificial Skin Platform that can be used for the treatment of pigmentation by artificially realizing the skin of pregnant women. For the stable realization of 3D artificial skin, a bilayer hydrogel composed of collagen type I and fibrin was designed and applied to the study to reduce the tension-induced contraction of collagen type I, the extracellular matrix (ECM) of artificial skin, by dynamic culture. Oxygen concentration and 17β-Estradiol (E2) concentration, which are highly related to melanin production, were selected as parameters of the pregnancy environment and applied to cell culture. Oxygen concentration, which is locally reduced in the first trimester (2.5–3%), and E2, which is upregulated in the third trimester, were applied to the cell culture process. We analyzed whether the 3D artificial skin implemented in the 3D Artificial Skin Platform could better represent the tendency of melanin expression in pregnant women than cells cultured under the same conditions in 2D. The expression levels of melanin and melanin-related genes in the 2D cell culture did not show a significant trend that was similar to the melanin expression trend in pregnant women. However, the 3D artificial skin platform showed a significant trend towards a 2-6-fold increase in melanin expression in response to low oxygen concentrations (2.5%) and E2 concentrations (17 ng/mL), which was similar to the trend in pregnant women in vivo. These results suggest that 3D artificial skin cultured on the Artificial Skin Platform has the potential to be used as a substitute for human pregnant skin in various research fields related to the treatment of pigmentation.