Swiss researchers rejuvenate cells for better wound healing
Published: Tuesday, Nov 28th 2023, 16:00
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Reprogrammed cells allow wounds in old people to heal faster. This was shown by researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) in a study published in the journal "Aging Cell". This should help burn victims in the future.
The researchers reprogrammed aged cells from real skin and inserted them into a model of old, injured skin tissue in the laboratory, as PSI announced on Tuesday.
According to the research institute, this significantly accelerated wound healing. The reason: similar to a reformatted hard disk, the reprogramming of cells also deletes functional errors that the old cells had accumulated during ageing, as the PSI explained. This makes them, like a newly installed computer, faster when they run newly installed programs.
Skin transplants
Therapies based on reprogrammed cells are to be used in the future for larger skin injuries, such as those that occur after burns, according to the PSI. Until now, tissue from uninjured parts of the body or from other people has been taken for the treatment of such injuries and used on the injured area.
However, according to PSI, tissue from other people can trigger rejection reactions. And it is often difficult to obtain enough of it in sufficient quality from older people's own skin.
Mechanical reprogramming
The reprogrammed cells have the special property that they are in an undifferentiated, so to speak youthful state, as the PSI said. Depending on the environment in which they multiply, they can mature into different types of cells, including skin cells.
Specifically, the researchers reprogrammed so-called fibroblasts for the experiment. Fibroblasts are not yet fully differentiated cells of the connective tissue. To reprogram the cells, they embedded the fibroblasts in a kind of grid. Due to the tight fencing of the grid, the cells have to spread upwards. In doing so, they apparently lose the stored information about their shape and function, as the researchers explained.
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