Enhancement of Wound Healing by Biosynthetic Growth Factors

摘要

Soft tissue injuries and burn wounds constitute the greatest types of battlefieldinjuries. The goal of our research was to develop agents that would enhance healing of soft tissue injuries. The first objective was to establish the profile of growth factors and proteases during acute healing of skin wounds and to compare this with the profile of these agents in chronic wounds to establish what biochemical abnormalities need to be corrected to accelerate healing of slowly healing wounds. Our second objective was to evaluate the effect of topical treatment of exogenous growth factors on healing of autograph skin grafts in a pig model of full-thickness burns treated with partial thickness skin grafts. Our results demonstrate that cytokines, growth factors, their receptors and proteases play key roles in regulating healing of acute wounds. Furthermore, an imbalance of these agents which results in elevated levels of MMPs contributes to the impaired healing of chronic wounds. This implies that optimum treatment of battlefield injuries that are extensive including large burns or injuries with large tissue losses may require combination therapies that include growth factors and inhibitors of MMPs to achieve rapid healing.