Patients would be able to leave the hospital wearing their incubators, just as if they were wearing a bandage or cast. The patient would only need to return to the hospital to monitor healing of the wound.

Erikkson said the treatment provides a convenient alternative to surgery.

"It is done with simpler tools and keeps the patient out of the operating room," Erikkson said. "Our goal is to be able to treat patients as outpatients."

Erikkson said that treating a severe leg burn with this method would first require removing the dead skin. An incubator would then be placed on the wound to get rid of infection, and a small piece of skin would be removed from the wound to create a cell suspension.

When the patient returned, the liquid from the incubator would be removed, the piece of skin that had been removed would be placed in a cell medium, and the wound would be allowed to heal.

Erikkson, is conjunction with Dr. Richard Mulligan of the Whitehead Institute of Cambridge, is now trying to incorporate genetic therapy into this novel healing technique.

"The reason we started to collaborate with Richard Mulligan," Erikkson said, "was that we thought it would be useful to use gene transfer techniques."

Erikkson said he was injected genes directly into the wounds of Yorkshire pigs so that they can manufacture their own growth factor, rather than having it supplied by the incubator.

Erikkson said he first started to research new techniques for healing wounds 20 years ago, when he was dissatisfied with the standard treatments for burn wounds.

The results of Erikkson's initial research were published in the September 27 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Mulligan, Karl Breuing, Paul Liu, Peter Vogt, Chris Andree and Simon Thompson co-authored the paper.

Erikkson said that the results of the gene therapy experiments will be published in about one month.