First in a three series Kyodo News Professor Hisashi Aoyama is certain of the future of cultured skin.

His certainty was instilled by a a 27-year-old patient who suffered burns all over her body in August, when a fire razed her company dormitory in Gifu Prefecture.

Aoyama, a professor at Aichi Medical University who has been treating burn victims for about 30 years, said skin transplantation was the only way the woman, a native of Thailand, could be saved.

The problem was she had no relatives in Japan from whom skin could be transplanted.

So a piece of skin was taken from her body and cultivated to the size needed for grafting. A shred of skin measuring 5 sq. mm grows to 200 sheets -- about half the size of a postcard -- in three weeks.

Skin culture is a branch of tissue engineering aimed at regenerating human bodies impaired by sickness or injury. Experts say the commercialization of tissue engineering is just around the corner, and Japanese corporations are preparing for making their presence felt in what could be a 50 trillion yen market.

Immeasurable demand for cultured skin is expected, and two companies are competing fiercely to develop it as a commercial product.

Japan Tissue Engineering (J-TEC), a venture enterprise in Gamagori, Aichi Prefecture, plans to market cultured skin in 2002.

A J-TEC official said: "The number of patients requiring cultured skin because of burns is estimated at 15,000 a year. Its use will certainly expand in (Japan's) aging society because some senior citizens suffer bedsores."

J-TEC hopes to enlarge its business from skin to cartilage and bone, and to make inroads in Asia. It is eyeing 800 billion yen in annual sales 50 years from now.

Japan's largest manufacturer of contact lenses, Menicon Co. of Nagoya, is building a plant on the outskirts of Kasugai, Aichi Prefecture. Menicon is staking its future on the development of cultured skin, and the factory will be its production base.

Menicon executives said they hope skin culture will become a mainstay of their business along with the manufacture of contact lenses. Bringing the cornea to the commercial stage is also being considered.

The Health and Welfare Ministry is wary of cultured cellular products such as cultured skin, citing fears of infection. There is also a problem of whether the ministry should approve health insurance coverage for such medical treatment.

Menicon said it is difficult for other companies to get into tissue engineering because of the risks involved.

It believes that if many patients end up accepting cultured skin, the ministry will agree to treating them under the health insurance scheme.

Minoru Ueda, a professor at the graduate school of Nagoya University and a technical adviser to J-TEC, stressed the importance of the industrialization of tissue engineering.

"In order not to become a colony of the United States in the field of tissue engineering," he said, "it is indispensable for corporations to press ahead with marketing and making the technology available for widespread use."