Towards Electromagnetic Guidance of Cells in Wound Healing
Use of electromagnetic fields to influence cell behavior is understudied in comparison to the use of small molecules. Researchers here offer an example of a potential use for this class of approach to therapy in wound healing, working in models of skin tissue. Tissue models are not tissue, but nonetheless, it is interesting to look at this work in the context of the few other studies suggesting that regeneration can be accelerated by the suitable application of electric currents and electromagnetic fields.
The researchers worked from an old hypothesis that electric stimulation of damaged skin can be used to heal wounds. The idea is that skin cells are electrotactic, which means that they directionally 'migrate' in electric fields. This means that if an electric field is placed in a petri dish with skin cells, the cells stop moving randomly and start moving in the same direction. The researchers investigated how this principle can be used to electrically guide the cells in order to make wounds heal faster. Using a tiny engineered chip, the researchers were able to compare wound healing in artificial skin, stimulating one wound with electricity and letting one heal without electricity. The differences were striking.
"We were able to show that the old hypothesis about electric stimulation can be used to make wounds heal significantly faster. In order to study exactly how this works for wounds, we developed a kind of biochip on which we cultured skin cells, which we then made tiny wounds in. Then we stimulated one wound with an electric field, which clearly led to it healing three times as fast as the wound that healed without electric stimulation."
In the study, the researchers also focused on wound healing in connection with diabetes, a growing health problem worldwide. "We've looked at diabetes models of wounds and investigated whether our method could be effective even in those cases. We saw that when we mimic diabetes in the cells, the wounds on the chip heal very slowly. However, with electric stimulation we can increase the speed of healing so that the diabetes-affected cells almost correspond to healthy skin cells."
Link: https://www.chalmers.se/en/current/news/mc2-how-electricity-can-heal-wounds-three-times-as-fast/