When I first heard about one of South Korea’s hottest new skin boosters, I had to read the description twice. Its headline ingredient wasn’t salmon DNA, exosomes or another lab-made regenerative compound, but extracellular matrix derived from donated human skin — in other words, from the tissue of someone who had died.
As unsettling as that may sound, the underlying technology isn’t new. Donated human skin has been used in reconstructive and plastic surgery for years. The tissue is processed to remove the donor’s cells, leaving behind the skin’s natural supporting framework — a mesh of collagen, elastin and other proteins known as the extracellular matrix (ECM).
In surgery, this processed tissue, known as acellular dermal matrix (ADM), is typically used as a sheet or graft to help support and repair tissue. The newer aesthetic injectables take the idea a step further: the remaining ECM is processed into tiny particles small enough to be injected into the skin through a needle.
ECM skin boosters have been available in Singapore since late last year.
RE20 and RE20 Fine (a finer-particle version for thinner, more delicate areas like the undereyes), made by South Korean tissue-engineering company L&C Bio, landed at the end of 2025, followed more recently by CellREDM from HansBiomed, a South Korean tissue-engineering and medical-device company specialising in human tissue grafts and regenerative materials.
The appetite for human-derived regenerative treatments appears to be growing both here and abroad. Social media influencers are already enthusiastically documenting their treatments and results.
Meanwhile, L&C Bio is already developing another injectable using donated human adipose tissue, this time aimed at restoring facial changes associated with rapid weight loss, including the hollowing commonly dubbed “Ozempic face”.
As the use of donated human tissue in aesthetics gains popularity, however, it raises a more fundamental question: where, exactly, is all this tissue coming from? Both South Korean ECM manufacturers say their raw human dermal tissue is sourced from the US through regulated, ethical tissue-donation programmes.
But publicly available information does not identify the specific tissue banks or organisations supplying the dermis used in these injectables.
Those questions matter because the wider US non-transplant human tissue trade has faced scrutiny over gaps in oversight and cases involving consent and the handling of donated bodies. Bioethicist Dr Art Caplan has famously likened parts of the industry to the “Wild West”.
That doesn’t mean the same concerns necessarily apply to the tissue used in these products but it does make traceability worth examining.
So are cadaver-derived ECM skin boosters simply the next evolution of a well-established medical material, or does their arrival in aesthetics raise questions the industry still needs to answer?
I spoke to Dr Harvey Ho of Skinscape Clinic and Dr Rachel Ho of The Skin Longevity Clinic — both of whom offer ECM skin boosters at their clinic — about the science and safety behind this unusual new category of injectables.