Nematic Fibrin Fibers Enabling Vascularized Thrombus Implants Facilitate Scarless Cutaneous Wound Healing (Adv. Mater. 25/2023)

Advances in Scarless Wound Healing

Wound care is a perennial burden for the US healthcare system, costing an estimated $25 billion annually for the treatment of chronic wounds alone [1]. Problems surrounding scarring have also created a $12 billion market annually for treatment [2]. In the 1979 landmark study, Rowlatt et al. reported that human fetal wound healing did not cause scar formation [3]. Animal models were subsequently...

Scarless wound healing in the mammalian fetus.

Fetal wound healing is a remarkable process that is fundamentally different than postnatal healing. Healing of primarily closed, linear wounds occurs rapidly and without scarring. In late gestational age fetal sheep, a transition to adult-like healing occurs as evidenced by minimal scar formation. Acute inflammation is not involved, fibroblast recruitment and proliferation is minimal, the matri...

Cutaneous wound healing

Cellular and Molecular Characteristics of Scarless versus Fibrotic Wound Healing

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the discrete biology differentiating fetal wound repair from its adult counterpart. Integumentary wound healing in mammalian fetuses is essentially different from wound healing in adult skin. Adult (postnatal) skin wound healing is a complex and well-orchestrated process spurred by attendant inflammation that leads to wound closure with scar ...

Chemokines in cutaneous wound healing.

Healing of wounds is one of the most complex biological events after birth as a result of the interplay of different tissue structures and a large number of resident and infiltrating cell types. The latter are mainly constituted by leukocyte subsets (neutrophils, macrophages, mast cells, and lymphocytes), which sequentially infiltrate the wound site and serve as immunological effector cells but...