Silver is commonly used in wound dressings and topical formulations to assist in the management of wounds that are infected or at risk of becoming infected. They provide potent broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity, but should not cause sustained staining of the skin, dermal or systemic accumulation of silver, or discomfort to the patient. However, clinicians and healthcare personnel have bee...

Adult epidermal keratinocytes migrate by crawling, a process that requires protrusion of the plasma membrane at the front of the cell and contraction of the cell body at the rear. We have found that epidermal growth factor (EGF) and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) influence keratinocyte shape differently. Whereas IGF-1 stimulates membrane protrusion and facilitates cell spreading, EGF indu...

BACKGROUND To assess the efficacy of bandage contact lens (BCL) application to promote epithelialization and alleviate pain following corneal transplantation. METHODS Twenty-six consecutive patients who underwent corneal transplantation were randomly assigned to undergo BCL application (BCL group, n = 14) or no BCL application (control group, n = 12) at the end of the surgery. Corneal epithel...

The pleiotropic growth factor TGFbeta plays an important role in regulating responses to skin injury. TGFbeta targets many different cell types and is involved in all aspects of wound healing entailing inflammation, re-epithelialization, matrix formation and remodeling. To elucidate the role of TGFbeta signal transduction in keratinocytes during cutaneous wound healing, we have used transgenic ...

Delayed wound healing caused by inefficient re-epithelialization underlines chronic skin lesions such as those found in diabetes. The dioxin receptor (AhR) modulates cell plasticity and migration and its activation by occupational polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) results in severe skin lesions such as contact hypersensitivity, dermatitis and chloracne. Using wild-type (Ahr+/+) and AhR-nu...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Molecules native to tissue that fluoresce upon light excitation can serve as reporters of cellular activity and protein structure. In skin, the fluorescence ascribed to tryptophan is a marker of cellular proliferation, whereas the fluorescence ascribed to cross-links of collagen is a structural marker. In this work, we introduce and demonstrate a simple but robust optic...

BACKGROUND Wound re-epithelialization has been traditionally described to occur from the dermal appendages of the wound edges. As such, the role of the dermal wound bed in re-epithelialization has been questioned. In a patient undergoing breast reconstruction with free tissue transfer, the buried portions of the free flap skin paddle could be either de-epithelialized or deskinned. In case of ma...

A limited number of studies have investigated the potential of probiotics to promote wound healing in the digestive tract. The aim of the current investigation was to determine whether probiotic bacteria or their extracts could be beneficial in cutaneous wound healing. A keratinocyte monolayer scratch assay was used to assess re-epithelialization; which comprises keratinocyte proliferation and ...

Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) is a biocompatible, transparent hydrogel with physical strength that makes it promising as a material for an artificial cornea. In our previous study, type I collagen was immobilized onto PVA (PVA-COL) as a possible artificial cornea scaffold that can sustain a functional corneal epithelium. The cellular adhesiveness of PVA in vitro was improved by collagen immobilizatio...

The unusual cell type present on the posterior corneal surface of posterior polymorphous dystrophy patients has been characterized. In addition to microvilli and desmosomes, these cells contain abundant 10 nm filaments which by immunofluorescent staining were shown to consist of keratin proteins, a marker for epithelial cells.