Enhanced wound healing with biodegradable scaffolds

Deep wounds, such as third-degree burns, often heal with disfiguring scars that are inelastic and lack sweat glands, oil glands, and hair follicles. Therapies that stimulate the regeneration of blood vessels in the wound could significantly improve the healing process, but remain elusive. Guoming Sun et al. (pp. 20976–20981) assessed whether a biodegradable, dextranbased hydrogel—a 3D network of crosslinked polysaccharide—might serve as a scaffold to promote blood vessel growth and skin regeneration in patients with third-degree burns. The authors treated burn wounds on mice with either the hydrogel, a bovine-derived control scaffold currently used to treat human burn patients, or wound dressing materials without a scaffold. The team then compared wound healing progress over time among the differentially treated mice, and found more complete healing in hydrogeltreated mice than in controls. Further analysis revealed that the hydrogel scaffold facilitated rapid infiltration of inflammatory cells, thereby degrading the scaffold and enabling the growth of new blood vessels. The authors report that after 5 weeks of treatment, hydrogel-treated wounds sported hair growth and oil glands, and had achieved the appearance and thickness of normal mouse skin. The dextran-based hydrogels may lead to improved treatments for skin wounds, according to the authors. — N.Z.