Acne Treatments Guide - Articles

In man and domestic pets, scarring left after a trauma, surgery, burn or sports injury is a major health problem, often resulting in adverse aesthetics, loss of function, restriction of tissue elasticity and/or growth and negative psychological effects.

Current treatments are empirical, unreliable and unpredictable: there are no prescription drugs for the avoidance or treatment of dermal scarring. Skin injuries on early mammalian embryos heal perfectly with no scars whereas injuries in adult mammals scar.

Scientists are investigating the cellular and molecular differences between scar-free healing in embryonic and adult injuries. Relevant differences include the inflammatory response, which in embryonic injuries consists of fewer quantities of less differentiated inflammatory cells. This, together with augmented levels of morphogenetic molecules involved in skin growth and morphogenesis, implies that the growth factor profile in a healing embryonic wound is highly different from that in an adult wound.

These experiments produced scar-free wound healing in adults. Such studies have allowed the recognition of therapeutic targets; an adequate treatment clearly improves or completely prevents scarring during adult wound healing in experimental animals. Some of these new medications have satisfyingly completed safety studies and others. This has allowed them to enter human clinical trials with approval from the appropriate regulatory authorities. Based on favorable results attained from these experiments lead medications have now entered human patient-based tests e.g. in skin graft donor sites.

The hypothesis is that evolutionary factors have been exerted on intermediate sized, widespread, dirty injuries with high tissue damage e.g. bites, bruises and contusions. Modern injuries (e.g. resulting from trauma or surgery) made by sharp objects and healing in a clean or sterile environment with close tissue apposition are new situations, not previously encountered in Nature and to which the evolutionary selected wound healing reactions are somewhat useless. It has been demonstrated that both repair with scarring and regeneration can happen within the same animal, including man, and of course within the same tissue, thereby suggesting that they share similar procedures and regulators.

Consequently, by subtly altering the ratio of growth factors present in adult wound healing, we can induce adult injuries to heal perfectly with no scars, with accelerated healing and with no negative consequences, e.g. on wound strength or wound infection rates. This implies that scarring may no longer be an ineludible sequel of modem injury or surgery and that a completely new pharmaceutical concept to the avoidance of human scarring is now possible. Not only skin suffers from scarring; they can appear in many other tissues as well.

Thus scar-healing drugs could have extensive benefits and avoid complications in several tissues, e.g. prevention of blindness after scarring due to eye damage, support of neuronal reconnections in the central and peripheral nervous system by the avoidance of glial scarring, restitution of normal gut and reproductive function by avoiding strictures and adhesions after damage to the gastrointestinal or reproductive systems, and recovery of locomotor function by avoiding scarring in tendons and ligaments.