International Journal of Molecular Sciences

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Dear Colleagues,

Understanding the complex processes involved in wound healing is profoundly important because proper responses to injuries and the triggering of healing are critical for survival. Wound healing in general follows four distinct phases: re-establishing hemostasis, inflammation, the development of healing tissue to repair the damage, and the remodeling of newly formed tissue to restore the original tissue. Responses to injury and healing occur in all parts of the body. Internal-tissue wound healing is generally not faced with microorganism infection, whereas the healing of skin wounds involves infection more often than not. Despite the numerous studies designed to understand acute/normal wound healing processes, the findings have not significantly informed the changes that occur when wounds do not heal normally or do not heal at all. In this Special Issue, we endeavor to present reviews of the findings that we have accumulated on the specific processes of acute/normal healing, exploring the molecular mechanisms of wound healing and what goes array when wounds do not heal or heal abnormally.

Prof. Dr. Manuela Martins-Green
Dr. Athena Soulika
Guest Editors

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Keywords

inflammation
re-epithelialization
scar formation
regeneration
hypertrophic scar
chronic wounds

Published Papers (1 paper)

Review

13 pages, 1687 KiB

Open AccessReview

Assessing Animal Models to Study Impaired and Chronic Wounds

by Shayan Saeed and Manuela Martins-Green

Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25(7), 3837; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms25073837 - 29 Mar 2024

Viewed by 694

Abstract

Impaired healing wounds do not proceed through the normal healing processes in a timely and orderly manner, and while they do eventually heal, their healing is not optimal. Chronic wounds, on the other hand, remain unhealed for weeks or months. In the US alone, chronic wounds impact ~8.5 million people and cost ~USD 28–90 billion per year, not accounting for the psychological and physical pain and emotional suffering that patients endure. These numbers are only expected to rise in the future as the elderly populations and the incidence of comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity increase. Over the last few decades, scientists have used a variety of approaches to treat chronic wounds, but unfortunately, to date, there is no effective treatment. Indeed, while there are thousands of drugs to combat cancer, there is only one single drug approved for the treatment of chronic wounds. This is in part because wound healing is a very complex process involving many phases that must occur sequentially and in a timely manner. Furthermore, models that fully mimic human chronic wounds have not been developed. In this review, we assess various models currently being used to study the biology of impaired healing and chronic non-healing wounds. Among them, this paper also highlights one model which shows significant promise; this model uses aged and obese db/db^−/− mice and the chronic wounds that develop show characteristics of human chronic wounds that include increased oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, damaged microvasculature, abnormal collagen matrix deposition, a lack of re-epithelialization, and the spontaneous development of multi-bacterial biofilm. We also discuss how important it is that we continue to develop chronic wound models that more closely mimic those of humans and that can be used to test potential treatments to heal chronic wounds. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms on Wound Healing)

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