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NASA's SpaceX-Dragon spacecraft carried numerous things important for scientific studies, including consumables for crew members, detergent, and even a skin bioprinter, on a recent resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS), launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

While such missions are routine and necessary for astronauts spending months in space, the bioprinter, which is thought to be a portable handheld device that uses a person's own skin cells to build a tissue patch to repair wounds and speed up the healing process, has sparked people's interest.

Skin bioprinting has been recognised as "a revolutionary approach for producing artificial skin from synthetic and natural building blocks" in many scholarly works, according to pubmed.gov.

We reached out to an expert on Earth while we awaited results from the ISS-based studies. Multiple factors, including immunological response and environmental changes, impact how our skin recovers after an injury, according to Dr. Sachin Dhawan, senior consultant, Department of Dermatology, Fortis Memorial Research Institute, Gurugram.

"Wound healing on a spacecraft or moon will differ from wound healing on Earth due to differences in pressure, gravity, and environment composition. Layer-by-layer deposition of cells and scaffolding materials over the wounded areas is what three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting for injury reconstruction entails," he explained.

Bioprinting, according to Dr. Dhawan, "allows for exact and reproducible insertion of cell types and construct development to replace injured or damaged regions."

"As a result, wound healing is accelerated and infection is avoided, allowing astronauts in space, for example, to resume their tasks.” It's a tremendous step forward over natural wound healing, particularly for large wounds," he noted.