Skin allograft donors can be of two kinds: Living & Deceased Donors

Living Donor – For procurement of Skin grafts, the living donor needs to undergo a series of investigations for preoperative evaluation followed by a surgical procedure under suitable anaesthesia, hospitalisation for at least 2-3 days, donor site healing time of about 10 days and postoperative wound site pain. Maximum body surface area that can be safely utilised for harvesting of skin grafts is 15 – 20% at a time.

To avoid vested interests and commercial angles – it is advisable to use only close relatives as living donors. In the present age of nuclear families, availability of such a relative is obviously very rare and inconvenient too. Sadly, it is even more difficult to come across a willing donor for a young female patient. In reality, the majority of our patients are young females from poor socioeconomic strata with compromised nutritional status and have large burn size. So the problem is obviously challenging.

Deceased Donor – The other alternative is to procure skin grafts from a cadaver donor (or a deceased person), and preserve them for use in future. The concept of skin donation after death is not new, and the first skin bank was established in the USA around1950.

The skin allograft transplant differs from organ transplantation as the skin grafts are used to provide temporary protection and are not expected to survive in the recipient permanently as a transplanted organ. This means that neither ABO blood group nor HLA matching is required for allograft skin transplantation. So any human being can be a donor for anyone else.

The paucity of live relative donors and the inconvenience associated with this procedure made it obvious that we need to obtain skin allografts from cadaver donors.