Removing Scars
In human beings and domestic animals, scarring in the skin after trauma, surgery, burns or a sports injury is a major medical problem, usually resulting in altered aesthetics, loss of function, restriction of tissue elasticity and/or growth and adverse psychological effects.
Current treatments are strictly empirical, unreliable and uncertain. There are no prescription drugs for the avoidance or treatment of dermal scarring. Skin injuries on early mammalian embryos cure perfectly with no scars, whereas injuries to adult mammals are prone to scarring.
In scar treatment research, specialists are exploring the cellular and molecular differences between perfect healing in embryonic injuries and scar-forming healing in adult injuries. Relevant differences include the inflammatory reaction, which in embryonic injuries consists of lower numbers of less differentiated inflammatory cells. This occurrence, together with augmented levels of morphogenetic molecules involved in skin growth and morphogenesis, implies that the growth factor profile of an embryonic injury is highly different from that of an adult injury.
These experiments resulted in scar-less healing in the adult subject and have lead to the identification of appropriate therapeutic targets. It has been found that effective skin care highly improves or completely avoids scarring during adult injury healing in experimental animals. Some of these new drugs have successfully completed safety and other studies, such that they have entered human clinical trials with approval from the appropriate regulatory authorities. Based on encouraging results from these volunteer experiments, the leading drugs 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 considerable tissue destruction e.g. bites, bruises and contusions. Modern injuries (e.g. resulting from trauma or surgery) caused by sharp instruments, are recent situations not previously found in nature, in which the evolutionary selected wound healing reactions are somewhat useless. It has been shown that both repair with scarring and regeneration can happen within the same animal, including man, and of course within the same tissue, thereby implying that they share similar procedures and regulators.
Consequently, by slightly 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 without adverse effects, e.g. on wound strength or wound infection rates. This implies that scarring may no longer be an unavoidable consequence of modem injury or surgery, and that a fully new pharmaceutical approach to the avoidance of human scarring is now possible. Scarring after injury occurs in many tissues in addition to the skin.
Thus scar-healing drugs could have widespread benefits and avoid complications in various tissues, e.g. the prevention of blindness after scarring due to eye damage, facilitation of neuronal reconnections in the central and peripheral nervous system by the elimination of glial scarring, recovery of normal gut and reproductive function by preventing strictures and adhesions after damage to the gastrointestinal or reproductive tracts, and the recovery of locomotor function by preventing scarring in tendons and ligaments.
Scars caused by wounds, burns or surgeries can now be easily faded. Dissolve scars with an exclusive formulation that regenerates damaged cells.
Published December 19th, 2007
