While practically everyone we know carries a scar or two that too not the emotional ones! While there is not much that can be done about the healed skin that embellishes us with the marking of a battle won survived through the scars themselves do not fade away.
However, researchers have found a way to make fresh wounds heal with regenerated skin in lieu of the usual scar tissues that typically take over, something thought impossible in mammals ergo humans before.
George Cotsarelis, chair of the department of dermatology at the university of Pennsylvania and head of one of the team in this recent find said, "Essentially, we can manipulate wound healing so that it leads to skin regeneration rather than scarring. The secret is to regenerate hair follicles first. After that, the fat will regenerate in response to the signals from those follicles."
The very reason why scar tissue looks so very different from regular skin is its lack of fat cells and/or hair follicles.
Now what we call normal or regular skin, the kind which comes to be in-between small paper cuts or the one with which we are born with, eventually blends into whatever place there once was a wound is called adipocytes.
Whereas, the ugly scar tissue is mostly made up of cells called myofibroblasts and does not contain any fat cells. The very reason it does not blend into its surrounding after the wound heals to seem different forever.
The same goes for ageing skin - as we age, we lose our adipocytes, which leads to discolouration and deep, irreversible wrinkles.
But what is cause for celebration is that scientists have now discovered a way that turns existing myofibroblasts into adipocytes, implying that as a wound heals, the skin which takes over is going to be what we consider the normal one which scientists previously thought was only possible in amphibians and fish.
Another one of the head of the teams from the University of Carlifornia, Irvine, Maksim Plikus said, "The findings show we have a window of opportunity after wounding to influence the tissue to regenerate rather than scar.
Previous researches had unveiled that in the process of skin regeneration the hair follicles would always develop first with fat cells and hair follicles developing separately but never independently.
At that point in observation, they suspected that the growth of hair follicles may have had actually assisted the growth of fat cells in regenerating skin, the researchers then induced the growth of hair follicles beforehand in newly forming scar tissue in mice and in lab-grown synthesized human skin samples.
This is something that would never occur in nature, seeing as scar tissue has no hair follicles in it.
They found that the hair follicles released a signalling protein called Bone Morphogenetic Protein (BMP) as soon as they started forming, and this actually converted the scar's myofibroblasts into adipocytes.
If hair follicles were induced to grow where a wound was healing, the resulting skin was found to be indistinguishable from pre-existing skin.
"Typically, myofibroblasts were thought to be incapable of becoming a different type of cell," says Cotsarelis.
"But our work shows we have the ability to influence these cells, and that they can be efficiently and stably converted into adipocytes."
If the team can somehow replicate the results in a human trial - by figuring out how to manipulate the Bone Morphogenetic Protein in scar tissue, for example - it could lead to entirely new ways of wound healing that would be indistinguishable from naturally regenerated skin.
Let us hope that some of that knowledge will lead to treatments in the future that can help wounds heal without scarring.
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