The study describes a lab‑grown skin model that includes immune cells (macrophages) to better mimic real skin, especially for testing drugs that affect skin scarring. It doesn’t involve the peptide humanin or give any advice you can use at home.

The lack of the immune component in most of the engineered skin models remains a challenge to study the interplay between different immune and non-immune cell types of the skin. Immunocompetent human<i>in vitro</i>skin models offer potential advantages in recapitulating<i>in vivo</i>like behavior which can serve to accelerate translational research and therapeutics development for skin diseases. Here we describe a three-dimensional human full-thickness skin (FTS) equivalent incorporating polarized M1 and M2 macrophages from human peripheral CD14⁺monocytes. This macrophage-incorporated FTS model demonstrates discernible immune responses with physiologically relevant cytokine production and macrophage plasticity under homeostatic and lipopolysaccharide stimulation conditions. M2-incorporated FTS recapitulates skin fibrosis phenotypes with transforming growth factor-<i>&#x3b2;</i>1 treatment as reflected by significant collagen deposition and myofibroblast expression, demonstrating a M2 potentiation effect. In conclusion, we successfully biofabricated an immunocompetent FTS with functional macrophages in a high-throughput (HT) amenable format. This model is the first step towards a HT-assay platform to develop new therapeutics for skin diseases.