Development of a Stable and Effective Off-the-Shelf Wound Care Treatment for Combat Burn Injuries
Abstract
FY22 DMRDP BWMIR Focus Area: Understanding combat traumatic wound physiology and wound progression through preclinical and clinical studies to inform clinical practice guidelines and standard of care efficacy and gaps. Extensive burns and full-thickness wounds present a major clinical challenge for patients, even after treatment. Despite technological advancement in treatments, healing rates remain below 50% success. Patients who suffer from either of these types of injuries benefit from rapid treatments that result in complete closure and protection of the wounds. In particular, burn patients who receive delayed treatments are often subject to extensive scarring that can result in negative long- term physiological effects. Currently, the use of spilt-thickness autografts is currently the gold standard of treatment, but this option is often limited by the availability of a suitable area of healthy donor skin to harvest. Cellular and non-cellular biological skin-equivalents are commonly used as an alternative treatment option for these patients, however, these treatments usually involve multiple surgical procedures and associated high costs for production and repeated wound treatment. To overcome these limitations, cellular therapy is a promising alternative to biological skin-equivalents because a successful cell-based technique could rapidly cover wounds and accelerate healing using living components. Among the available cell sources, human stem cells are an attractive cell source for applications in regenerative medicine because of their high proliferation capacity, multipotency, immunomodulatory activity, and lack of significant immunogenicity. Many studies have shown that stem cells promote healing in acute full-thickness wound care; regenerative effects are believed to be primarily due to the paracrine effects of the growth factors and cytokines released by the stem cells, defined as the secretome. Recent research has shown that stem cell-derived secretomes promote angiogenesis and accelerate tissue regeneration. Secretomes have been used as a conditioned medium since high levels of various growth factors and tissue-repairing agents from therapeutic cells are released into the culture medium. However, the translation of conditioned media into a treatment for human applications is not possible due to numerous undefined factors in the conditioned medium, thus creating safety concerns from the regulatory perspective. To overcome the regulatory challenges, our approach was to identify and select the stem cell- derived proteins involved in accelerating wound healing to develop an effective cell-free therapeutic platform consisting of highly potent recombinant proteins. In this proposed study, we will fabricate the alginate-gelatin foam with stem cell-derived recombinant proteins and evaluate the clinical feasibility for wound healing in a preclinical porcine full-thickness skin injury model. We believe that our prototype product will an alternative option for the rapid recovery of normal skin tissue and function in military Service Members and civilians who suffered from a full-thickness deep skin wound.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 04, 2024
- Source ID
- HT94252310823
Entities
People
- Young Min Ju
Organizations
- United States Army
- Wake Forest University