Our skin serves as the first protective barrier to outside pathogens. But once the skin is penetrated and damaged, three consecutive stages will take place: inflammation, proliferation, and remodeling. Local inflammation serves an important role since it becomes a sort of "activator" for further responses. One such response is the release of chemical signals, which will ultimately help deliver clotting agents and phagocytes to the wound. If you're scratching your head wondering what these are, don't worry! I'm here to help.
Clotting agents will, simply enough, clot. This will prevent the loss of too much blood, but we're not done yet. Foreign material that flooded the wound, whether this be specks of dust or pathogens, has to be taken care of. Luckily for us, phagocytes love to eat material, but only foreign material (which is good, or else they would be engulfing our bacteria as well). From here on, antibodies become activated and blah blah blah... Admittedly, I am going to skip over quite a few steps here, but, they're not essential to understanding wound healing. In fact, the remaining immune responses deal with cleaning up the mess: destroying the antigens (foreign material) and then creating immunity to the antigens.
At this point, we still have a gash in our skin. So, proliferation takes place: the cells surrounding the wound begin to reproduce rapidly and move across the wound. Even once the wound is closed, the cells are still at work. During the remodeling phase, the dermal tissues continue to reproduce in order to increase strength and support.
Now, all these steps were somewhat simplified. But regardless, the scope of artificial wound healing is to improve on these existing steps. This can be in the form of accelerating the entire process, or even creating new skin for the scarring that remains.
-Tudor
*in the sense that the healing has to be promoted by some outside factors
Will your research be focused on one of those steps (inflammation, proliferation, remodeling), or the entire process?
ReplyDeleteTechnically, the entire process. But, since I am focusing on how the wound heals and the long term impact, I would say the proliferation and remodeling steps are most relevant to my research.
DeleteThanks Adam, I hope you'll enjoy what I discover.
ReplyDelete