Now, three-fourths of its skin goes to the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation. The Arizona tissue bank harvests skin from a Phoenix hospital with a burn center, and it says local burn patients' needs are being met. But burn center staff said skin remains scarce and that it usually takes calls to several banks to get what they need. That's never changed. A quarter of the country's tissue banks dedicated to skin have closed over the past decade because of financial trouble.
Burn centers buy sporadically.
They might have seven burns one week and none for the next three months. Larry Hierholzer, the executive director of the Orange County Eye and Tissue Bank in Santa Ana, worked for a skin bank in Torrance that folded because spotty sales couldn't cover its costs. With LifeCell, the Orange County bank always has a customer. The companies would not exist without the tissue banks. Tissue banks ask for the donation at the time of death.