People with diabetes tend to have faster wounds and slower healing. Researchers have developed a method that uses electricity to heal a diabetic wound three times faster than her. This offers great potential for treating diseases that lead to poor wound healing.
Diabetics are 15 times more likely to have amputations due to sores and ulcers on their feet. That’s why it’s important to look out for even the smallest cuts, scrapes, and scratches that can develop into larger wounds.
When diabetes is poorly controlled, blood sugar levels are higher than they should be. As a result, nutrients and oxygen are blocked from energizing the cells, the immune system does not work efficiently, and systemic inflammation develops in the body. Wound repair may also be slower in older people, people with poor circulation, and people with spinal cord injuries.
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and the University of Freiburg in Germany have developed a method of using electricity to accelerate the healing of chronic wounds, especially in people with diabetes.
“Chronic scarring is a big social problem that we don’t hear much about,” said Maria Asplund, the study’s corresponding author. “Discovering a method that could potentially heal wounds up to three times faster could be a game changer for people who often suffer from non-healing wounds, such as diabetics and the elderly.”
Using electricity to stimulate healing is nothing new. Recent years have seen the development of smart bandages and bandages that zap wounds before they dissolve.
The principle underlying the use of electricity to promote healing is that skin cells are galvanotaxis. That is, when an electric field is placed on a Petri dish filled with skin cells, the cells will migrate towards it. In the current study, researchers investigated using this principle to electrically induce cells to heal faster, especially in diabetics.
They focused on keratinocytes, the most predominant cell type found in the skin, which play an essential role in skin repair. increase.
By combining laser-induced graphene (LIG) and integrated hydrogels, researchers created a microfluidic platform capable of sustaining direct current (DC) electrical stimulation for hours. LIG is made by converting a polymer into a porous 3D form of graphene. They used a small designed ‘wound-on-a-chip’ to assess electrically stimulated wound healing, first in healthy cells and then in cells mimicking diabetic keratinocytes.
“We were able to show that the old hypothesis of electrical stimulation could significantly speed up wound healing,” said Asplund. “To study exactly how this would work for wounds, he developed a kind of biochip that cultured skin cells and made small wounds on it. Then in an electric field he It stimulated one wound.”
Using low electric fields of approximately 200 mV/mm, we found that DC stimulation accelerated wound closure in all cases and did not adversely affect the cells. The wound healing effect was also stronger when the current was applied to only one side of the wound rather than to both sides. Only about 36% were closed at that time. This corresponds to almost a 3-fold increase in wound closure rate.
When researchers applied an electric current to ‘diabetic’ cells, they found that after 12 hours of unidirectional stimulation, the cells were about 34% closed, compared to about 12% in unstimulated controls. The results were comparable to those seen in healthy cells, and the researchers concluded that electrical cell induction causes faster wound closure, including in diabetics.
“We looked at scars in diabetic models to see if our method would work in those cases,” said Asplund. “We found that mimicking diabetes in cells healed the chip wounds very slowly. It can speed up healing.”
Importantly, the researchers achieved these results without using salt bridges (tubes containing electrolytes that provide electrical contact between the two solutions). This should make it easier to translate this technique into his 3D model.
They plan to continue research to develop marketable wound healing products for individual use.
“We are now looking at how different skin cells interact during stimulation, aiming to get one step closer to a realistic wound,” said Asplund. “We want to develop a concept that can ‘scan’ wounds and adapt stimulation based on individual wounds. We believe this will be the key to effectively helping individuals with slow-healing wounds in the future. ”
The study was published in a journal lab-on-a-chip.
Source: Chalmers Institute of Technology
