The Use of Human Scalp and Abdominal Skin as In Vitro Models for Percutaneous Absorption

It is generally accepted that human abdominal skin used in vitro is a good model for in vivo percutaneous absorption [2]. However, such skin is often not readily available, especially for many workers within for example, the pharmaceutical industry, so instead they use animal models [5, 6, 27] or synthetic membranes [15, 20]. These systems are liable to provide inferior models as they are not from a human source. Hair transplant clinics provide a readily available supply of scalp skin; although this skin has some limitations we believe it is superior to animal models or synthetic membranes. However the major drawback of the scalp skin is that it is atypical being from patients with male pattern baldness.