Chronic wounds represent a major health threat to our nation. Complications in the healing of both surgical as well as nonsurgical wounds such as pressure ulcers are seen in a wide cross-section of our society, including but not limited to diabetics, obese, elderly, immune-compromised, stressed, malnourished and vasculopathic patients. Hypertrophic scarring represents another major problem associated with complicated wound healing.
Chronic wound healing is an annual $8 billion industry nationwide. In 2004, The Ohio State University Medical Center recorded nearly 6,500 patient visits for wound-healing services. The Ohio State University Medical Center’s Comprehensive Wound Center (CWC) was established in 2005 and is firmly committed to developing excellence in academic wound healing through high-quality patient care, cutting-edge research (basic, translational and clinical), and customized education addressing the specific needs of a successful wound clinician. Directed by Chandan K. Sen, PhD, the CWC represents a hub for wound sciences and care, a place where National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded basic research meets clinical trials as the fundamental principles of wound healing.
The studies focus on molecular mechanisms of wound healing, including the study of gene and gene products towards guiding clinical care for patients with chronic wounds. Sen and his colleagues, such as Gayle Gordillo, MD (plastic surgeon), and Sashwati Roy, PhD (genomics expert), in the Department of Surgery, are leading a multicenter “GeneScreen” study that searches for biological clues that are hidden in the genomics of blood vessels about why some wounds heal and some do not. This study, which will screen the human genome to identify patterns of gene expression in vascular tissue laser capture from human wound biopsies, is being conducted in partnership with National Healing Corporation (NHC), a private Florida-based company that manages 20 percent of the nation’s wound-healing centers, logging 250,000 patient visits per year.
In collaboration with Joyti Kamal, PhD, Director of the Information Warehouse at OSU, the CWC has established a biorepository of frozen wound biopsies patients with chronic wounds supported by a Web-enabled bioinformatics tool that can query clinical information related to each sample. This unique capability enables studies of finding specific biomarkers for wound healing and allows translating the information to tailor patient care as well as predicting outcomes of patients with chronic wounds.
References
Shilo S, Roy S, Khanna S, Sen CK MicroRNA in cutaneous wound healing: a new paradigm. DNA Cell Biol., 2007;26(4):227-37.
Roy S, Patel D, Khanna S, Gordillo GM, Biswas S, Friedman A, Sen CK
Transcriptome-wide analysis of blood vessels laser captured from human skin and chronic wound-edge tissue. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2007;4;104(36):14472-7.
Roy S, Khanna S, Rink T, Radtke J, Williams WT, Biswas S, Schnitt R, Strauch AR, Sen CK. p21waf1/cip1/sdi1 as a Central Regulator of Inducible Smooth Muscle Actin Expression and Differentiation of Cardiac Fibroblasts to Myofibroblasts.Mol Biol Cell. 2007 Dec;18(12):4837-46.
Ojha N, Roy S, He G, Biswas S, Velayutham M, Khanna S, Kuppusamy P, Zweier JL, Sen CK Assessment of wound-site redox environment and the significance of Rac2 in cutaneous healing. Free Radic Biol Med., 2007 Nov 17.
Hunt TK, Aslam RS, Beckert S, Wagner S, Ghani QP, Hussain MZ, Roy S, Sen CK. Aerobically derived lactate stimulates revascularization and tissue repair via redox mechanisms. Antioxid Redox Signal. 2007 Aug;9(8):1115-24.
Roy S, Khanna S, Nallu K, Hunt TK, Sen CK. Dermal wound healing is subject to redox control. Mol Ther. 2006 Jan;13(1):211-20.
Roy S, Khanna S, Yeh PE, Rink C, Malarkey WB, Kiecolt-Glaser J, Laskowski B, Glaser R, Sen CK. Wound site neutrophil transcriptome in response to psychological stress in young men. Gene Expr. 2005;12(4-6):273-87.
To locate more information pertaining to the above referenced articles please visit the PubMed database.