Experimental dressing boosts wound healing by managing body’s growth factors

https://youtu.be/GZv41vLW8bE

A new bio-inspired wound dressing material that captures and controls the release of growth factors involved in wound healing has shown promising results in animal and human skin models.

The new material, developed by scientists at Imperial College London, U.K., accelerates wound healing and human skin repair by releasing these molecules only when migrating cells apply tension to the dressing.

In new research published in Nature Materials, the dressings helped wounds on a mouse model close faster and improved the repair of human skin tissue in laboratory tests. This is the first time this mechanism has been shown to work in living tissue repair.

The researchers say the approach could one day reduce the need for costly manufactured medications by using repair molecules harvested directly from a patient's own wounds or blood.

The work builds on an earlier Imperial discovery first published in 2019, which demonstrated the concept in simple laboratory cell cultures. In a press release from the university, the authors say that by moving beyond cell culture into biologically complex environments, the research marks a major step towards clinical application.

By testing the material in rat bone injuries, mouse skin wounds, and living human skin maintained in the laboratory, the researchers showed that the mechanism can function in wounded tissue across different biological settings.

Magdalene Ho, PhD, from Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering and lead author of the study, said: “What excites me most is that this works in living human skin. We can see repair cells migrating into the wound dressing and confirm the material is engaging with human biology. That result makes me optimistic that this approach has a future in the clinic.”

The authors say that healing depends on growth factors that tell cells to move, multiply, form blood vessels, and rebuild tissue. In hard-to-heal wounds, these signals are often too weak, come at the wrong time, or break down before they can finish the job. Current treatments address this challenge by delivering large doses of growth factors through sprays or creams. However, these proteins break down quickly and can leave the wound before they can help. Other approaches use materials to support the wound structurally but do not provide the biological instructions that growth factors provide.

Instead of flooding the wound with medications or just acting as a support, the new material selects specific healing proteins from the wound or blood and keeps them inactive. When a repair cell moves into the wound and pulls on the dressing, the proteins are released and delivered right to that cell at the precise time and place where repair is happening.

This bioinspired design allows the system to work at doses hundreds to thousands of times lower than conventional growth-factor delivery approaches, and more than 2,000 times lower than a clinical growth-factor product.

Ben Almquist, PhD, Associate Professor in Bioengineering, Co-Director of the Imperial Network of Excellence in Wound Healing and Regeneration, and senior author of the study, said: "What particularly stands out with this research is that the patient's own body becomes the pharmacy. We are not delivering a manufactured drug and hoping it survives long enough to work. We are capturing what the body is already making and giving it back to the cells that need it, by encoding intelligence directly into the material, activated by the one signal guaranteed to be present right where healing is happening: the physical force of a cell pulling on its surroundings."

The researchers tested the technology in increasingly realistic settings. In a rat bone-injury model, it helped form new blood vessels. In living human skin in the lab, the dressing improved how fast tissue grew into the material. In mouse skin wounds, treated wounds were much smaller after ten days. In all these cases, materials that could not be activated by cell pulling did not have the same effects.