Fighting chronic wound infection – one model at a time

Wound infections are a serious medical problem for patients with non-healing chronic wounds and burn injuries. The healing of these wounds is often compromised by colonisation of many different bacteria, predisposing patients to life-threatening infections. Infected wounds continue to represent a complex problem for both health professionals and patients. Bacterial infections are a critical component of hard-to-heal wounds, often leading to biofilm formation, inhibition of innate inflammatory responses and resistance to traditional therapeutics. Over the last 20 years, tremendous progress has been made in understanding the intricacies of wound biofilm pathology and bacteria–host interactions. This has been achieved by the development of in vitro and in vivo models of wound infection. This review will discuss the challenges in the development of wound infection models and will focus on different in vivo models of cutaneous wound infection, highlighting advantages and clinical applicability of each model. It will also describe the development of novel bioluminescent models of cutaneous wound infection in vivo, which may help to revolutionise the future testing of novel antimicrobial therapeutics for the treatment of wounds.