Professor Ioannis Yannas, pioneer of regenerative medicine who invented artificial skin for the treatment of severe burns, dies at 90 | MIT News

Professor Ioannis V. Yannas SM ’59, a physical chemist and engineer best known for the invention of artificial skin for the treatment of severe burns and a longtime member of the MIT faculty, died on October 19 at the age of 90.

John Hart, Class of 1922 professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, says, “Professor Yanas was a beloved and distinguished colleague, teacher, and mentor. The impact of his inventions and his legacy on the field of bioengineering was enormous.”

Yannus, known to friends and colleagues as Yanni, held appointments in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. His main research interest during his career was the process of induced organ regeneration used to replace organs that are either severely injured or incurably diseased. His work also advanced the clinical use of collagen tubes to treat peripheral nerve injuries.

In 1969, when Yanas approached the late John Burke of Massachusetts General Hospital for collaboration, Burke took him on a tour of the children’s burn unit. Yannas said in later interviews, “There was enormous human suffering that was coming my way, and I felt I had to do something about it.” In 1981, the pair announced their breakthrough: a composite of silicone outer sheets on a scaffold of molecular materials prepared from cow tendons and shark cartilage. The scaffold enabled healthy skin cells to grow, while providing protection from infection and dehydration. Their discovery will be game-changing for the treatment of burn victims.

His artificial skin, which has been patented and is now manufactured as Integra, is still widely used on patients with severe and extensive burns and for other applications including some types of plastic surgery and the treatment of chronic skin wounds commonly suffered by people with diabetes. The unprecedented progress, later recognized as the first example of organ regeneration in adults, was previously thought impossible.

“Yanni’s courage in attacking a wide range of medical problems, including spinal cord infections, in investigating applications of collagen-based implants, has inspired others, including me, to work toward solutions to devastating conditions such as blindness, stroke, and spinal cord injury,” says Myron Spector, MD, professor emeritus of orthopedic surgery (biomaterials) at Massachusetts General Brigham and Harvard Medical School and affiliate of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Inspired to do.” Yannas and Spector together created several MIT courses, including 2.79 (Biomaterial-Tissue Interactions).

“As we were talking about the ingredients [for 2.79]Yanni proposed that we codify the cell behavior underlying the tissue response to transplantation,” explains Spector. “Within a short time, we devised a scheme of ‘unit cell processes’ to provide students with a code to understand the often unimaginably complex cellular processes that not only underlie the tissue response to transplantation, but which could guide the selection of tools needed to engineer medical devices and reveal their targets for treatment. All this meant that a fundamental concept, a control quantity, was used in chemical engineering to analyze systems, and apply it to cellular processes in the human body. Since then I myself use UCP all the time.

As a colleague serving as an aide in teaching and research, Spector says Yannas was eager to help and learn, courageous in his thinking, smart in his choices, able to keep an eye on the goal, respectful of students as well as faculty and other colleagues, and selfless. “These are the qualities we teach our students to look for when seeking much-needed colleagues in science and engineering.”

Yanas was born on April 14, 1935 in Athens, Greece, where he completed his high school education at Athens College. He received a BA in Chemistry from Harvard College in 1957, followed by an MS in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 1959. After a period of industrial research on polymers at WR Grace & Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he attended Princeton University, where he completed an MS degree in 1965 and a PhD in physical chemistry in 1966. Yannus joined the MIT faculty soon thereafter and remained at the institute for the next 59 years until his passing.

For his discoveries in organ regeneration, Yannas was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine (1987), the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2015), and the National Academy of Engineering (2017). He was also elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineering.

In addition, he was the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Society for Biomaterials Founders Award (1982) and the Society’s Clemson Award for Applied Science and Engineering (1992). He was the author of several journal articles, and sole author of the influential book, “Tissue and Organ Regeneration in Adults”.

Yannas’ work, and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015, was the subject of “Hope Regenerated”, a video produced by the MIT Mechanical Engineering Department. The film chronicles the development of Integra, which was initially known as a “failed experiment” but became a life-saving discovery that ushered in a new field of regenerative medicine.

“My father’s relationship with MIT was very meaningful to him,” says Tania Yannas Kluszak. “He considered MIT the ideal partner in his life’s work – pioneering life-saving research in organ regeneration.”

Yannas was predeceased by his brother, Pavlos. He is survived by his two children, Tania Kluszak and her husband Gordon, and Alexei Yannas and his wife Maria; His grandchildren – Alexandra, Marina, Sofia, Filippos and Nefeli; his sister, Elizabeth Tsitsinas; and many dear relatives and friends. A celebration of life will be announced at a later date.