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| Skin wounds healing in the presence of an electric field: Science Brush | Hassan A. Tahini |
Chronic wounds are a major health problem for diabetic patients and the
elderly – in extreme cases they can even lead to amputation. Using electric
stimulation, researchers in a project at Chalmers University of Technology,
Sweden, and the University of Freiburg, Germany, have developed a method
that speeds up the healing process, making wounds heal three times faster.
There is an old Swedish saying that one should never neglect a small wound
or a friend in need. For most people, a small wound does not lead to any
serious complications, but many common diagnoses make wound healing far more
difficult. People with diabetes, spinal injuries or poor blood circulation
have impaired wound healing ability. This means a greater risk of infection
and chronic wounds – which in the long run can lead to such serious
consequences as amputation.
Now a group of researchers at Chalmers and the University of Freiburg have
developed a method using electric stimulation to speed up the healing
process.
“Chronic wounds are a huge societal problem that we don’t hear a lot about.
Our discovery of a method that may heal wounds up to three times faster can
be a game changer for diabetic and elderly people, among others, who often
suffer greatly from wounds that won’t heal,” says Maria Asplund, Associate
Professor of Bioelectronics at Chalmers University of Technology and head of
research on the project.
Electric guidance of cells for faster healing
The researchers worked from an old hypothesis that electric stimulation of
damaged skin can be used to heal wounds. The idea is that skin cells are
electrotactic, which means that they directionally ‘migrate’ in electric
fields. This means that if an electric field is placed in a petri dish with
skin cells, the cells stop moving randomly and start moving in the same
direction. The researchers investigated how this principle can be used to
electrically guide the cells in order to make wounds heal faster. Using a
tiny engineered chip, the researchers were able to compare wound healing in
artificial skin, stimulating one wound with electricity and letting one heal
without electricity. The differences were striking.
“We were able to show that the old hypothesis about electric stimulation can
be used to make wounds heal significantly faster. In order to study exactly
how this works for wounds, we developed a kind of biochip on which we
cultured skin cells, which we then made tiny wounds in. Then we stimulated
one wound with an electric field, which clearly led to it healing three
times as fast as the wound that healed without electric stimulation,”
Asplund says.
Hope for diabetes patients
In the study, the researchers also focused on wound healing in connection
with diabetes, a growing health problem worldwide. One in 11 adults today
has some form of diabetes according to the World Health Organization (WHO)
and the International Diabetes Federation.
“We’ve looked at diabetes models of wounds and investigated whether our
method could be effective even in those cases. We saw that when we mimic
diabetes in the cells, the wounds on the chip heal very slowly. However,
with electric stimulation we can increase the speed of healing so that the
diabetes-affected cells almost correspond to healthy skin cells,” Asplund
says.
Individualised treatment the next step
The Chalmers researchers recently received a large grant which will allow
them to continue their research in the field, and in the long run enable the
development of wound healing products for consumers on the market. Similar
products have come out before, but more basic research is required to
develop effective products that generate enough electric field strength and
stimulate in the right way for each individual. This is where Asplund and
her colleagues come into the picture:
“We are now looking at how different skin cells interact during stimulation,
to take a step closer to a realistic wound. We want to develop a concept to
be able to ‘scan’ wounds and adapt the stimulation based on the individual
wound. We are convinced that this is the key to effectively helping
individuals with slow-healing wounds in the future,” Asplund says.
Reference:
Shaner S, Savelyeva A, Kvartuh A, et al. Bioelectronic microfluidic wound
healing: a platform for investigating direct current stimulation of injured
cell collectives. Lab Chip. 2023;23(6):1531-1546.
DOI: 10.1039/D2LC01045C