New research shows that wounds on cultured skin cells heal 3 times faster when stimulated with electric current. Image courtesy of Science Brush | Hassan A. Tahini.
Using electric stimulation, researchers in a project at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and the University of Freiburg, Germany, have developed a method that speeds up the healing process, making wounds heal 3 times faster. The work has implications for elderly people and those with diabetes.
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 to make wounds heal faster. Using a tiny engineered chip, the researchers were able to compare wound healing in artificial skin, stimulating 1 wound with electricity and letting 1 heal without electricity. The differences were striking, “which clearly led to it healing 3 times as fast as the wound that healed without electric stimulation,” said Maria Asplund, PhD, associate professor of bioelectronics at Chalmers and head of this research project.
The researchers also focused on wound healing in connection with diabetes. “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,” said Asplund.
