By Valerie Garnier
In man and domestic pets, scarring left after a trauma, surgery, burn or sports injury is an important health problem, usually resulting in altered aesthetics, loss of function, restriction of tissue elasticity and/or growth and adverse psychological effects.
Current treatments are empirical, troublesome and uncertain: there are no prescription medicines for the avoidance or treatment of dermal scarring. Skin wounds on early mammalian embryos heal perfectly with no scars whereas wounds in adult mammals scar.
Scientists are researching the cellular and molecular differences between perfect healing in embryonic and adult wounds. Important differences include the inflammatory reaction, which in embryonic wounds consists of fewer quantities of less differentiated inflammatory cells. This, together with augmented levels of morphogenetic molecules involved in skin growth and morphogenesis, means that the growth factor profile in a healing embryonic wound is very different from that in an adult wound.
These experiments produced scar-free wound healing in adults. Such studies have allowed the recognition of therapeutic targets; a correct treatment evidently improves or completely avoids scarring during adult wound healing in experimental animals. Some of these new medications have successfully passed safety tests and others. This has permitted them to enter human clinical trials with approval from the appropriate regulatory authorities. Based on encouraging results obtained from these experiments lead medications have now entered human patient-based trials e.g. in skin graft donor sites.
The theory is that evolutionary factors have been exerted on medium sized, widespread, dirty wounds with high tissue damage e.g. bites, bruises and contusions. Modern wounds (e.g. resulting from trauma or surgery) caused by sharp instruments and healing in a clean or aseptic environment with close tissue apposition are new situations, not previously found in Nature and to which the evolutionary selected wound healing reactions are somewhat inappropriate. It has been demonstrated that both healing with scarring and regeneration can happen within the same animal, including man, and indeed within the same tissue, thereby suggesting that they share similar mechanisms and regulators.
Consequently, by subtly altering the ratio of growth factors present in adult wound healing, we can induce adult wounds to heal perfectly with no scars, with accelerated healing and with no adverse consequences, e.g. on wound strength or wound infection rates. This means that scarring may no longer be an ineludible sequel of modem injury or surgery and that a completely new pharmaceutical approach to the avoidance of human scarring is now possible. Not only skin suffers from scarring; they can appear in many other tissues as well.
Thus scar-healing treatments could have extensive benefits and prevent complications in several tissues, e.g. prevention of blindness after scarring due to eye injury, support of neuronal reconnections in the peripheral and central nervous system by the avoidance of glial scarring, recovery of normal gut and reproductive function by avoiding strictures and adhesions after injury to the gastrointestinal or reproductive tracts, and restoration of locomotor function by avoiding scarring in tendons and ligaments.
Scars caused by wounds, burns or surgeries can now be easily faded using a natural skin care product with an exclusive formulation that rejuvenates injured cells.
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posted by Cheryl Levesque @ 6:37 AM
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