Scientists Use Electricity to Make Wounds Heal 3x Faster
Scientists have developed a specially engineered biochip that uses electricity to heal wounds up to three times faster than normal. It’s well known that electric fields can guide the movements of skin cells, nudging them towards the site of an injury for instance. In fact, the human body generates an electric field that does this naturally. So researchers from the University of Freiburg in Germany set out to amplify the effect.
While it might not heal severe injuries with the speed of a Marvel superhero, it could radically reduce the time it takes for small tears and lacerations to recover. For people with chronic wounds that take a long time to heal, such as those in elderly folk, those with diabetes, or people with poor blood circulation, recovering quickly from frequent small, open cuts could be a literal lifesaver.
While it’s established electricity can assist healing, the impact of an electric field’s strength and direction on the process has never been well established. So the researchers developed a bioelectronic platform and used it to grow artificial skin made up of cells called keratinocytes, which are the most common skin cell type and crucial for the healing process. They also compared the application of electric fields on one side of the wound with alternating fields on both sides of the wound.
Both healthy keratinocytes and keratinocytes designed to resemble those in people with diabetes migrated up to three times faster than skin cells without any electrical interference, with an electrical push from just one side of the wound proving most effective at repairing the artificial skin in the quickest time. Fortunately, none of the cells was damaged by the electrical fields tested.
Wounds that won’t heal in a typical, rapid fashion raise the risk of infection setting in and delaying healing further. In the most severe cases, this can lead to amputation, making any process that speeds up the process worth investigating for patients and healthcare providers.
The next stage is testing how all of this works on actual wounds in living humans, rather than skin cells grown in the lab. Developing practical applications will rely on translating the cheap, readily-available used materials in the experiment to real-world situations.
