* dibuat sebagai essay persyaratan mengikuti seleksi Novartis International Biocamp 2015
The European union completely ban the use of animal testing for cosmetics
development in 2013. The ban was a critical milestones in the effort to phase
out experimentation using animals. The medical research community were
currently guided by principles that whenever possible, to replace animal with
other reliable methods, reduce the number of animal and refine the techniques
used to minimize potential pain and distress and promote animal welfare. These
trends leads to the development of alternatives to animal testing. One such
alternatives is the use of cell culture and tissue engineering.
The Fraunhofer institute in 2010
launch the “skin from factory” project that essentially produced skin equivalents
in a fully automated process. The institute recognized that skin equivalents as
in vitro test system for chemicals, cosmetics and drugs are rare. Production of
an in vitro test system by manual cell culture and tissue engineering is time
consuming and required specifically trained personnel. Most interesting was
that the skin source for such system were foreskins which was an abundant by
product/medical waste of compulsory practice of khitan in Indonesia.
Rumah Sunatan a leading company
focused in khitan services claimed to reach more than 15.000 patient a year.
This is an untapped resource unique of Indonesia home to millions of observant Muslims.
This point of view is, for sure, not without challenges. Among others is the
ethical and religious issues that centered on the commercial use of human
tissues. However research on the potential cultivation of foreskins could
result benefit for many field such as stem cells, regenerative medicine, cell
therapy, cryopreservation.
Recently, the discovery of the
non-tumorigenic multilineage-stress enduring cells (MUSE) from dermal
fibroblast potentially resolve the concern on the use of iPS cells for therapy.
Dermal fibroblast contains a pluripotent subpopulation of mesenchymal stem
cells that evidently does not form tumour. This findings extends further the
importance of foreskin as skin sample source in regenerative medicine.
Cryopreservation of cells isolated from so many samples a year will also
stimulate research in the field of cryobiology and bio banking.
In conclusion, the production of
foreskin-derived skin equivalent as an in vitro skin testing system on a large
scale will largely reduce the demand on animal testing. Indonesia has a unique potential to solve other
problems in medical research. Communication with appropriate religious body and
government agency should be commenced to resolve issues that aroused on the
collection, cultivation and storage of foreskins for medical research.
