Deliver oxygen to the body to accelerate wound healing

About a quarter of diabetic patients will suffer from painful foot ulcers.

Jianjun Guan, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the McKelvey School of engineering at Washington University in St.

"Oxygen has two functions: one is to improve the survival of skin cells in diabetic wounds under hypoxic conditions; second, oxygen can stimulate skin cells to produce growth factors required for wound repair

Human tissues need oxygen to survive.

Their hydrogel delivers oxygen to the wound through microspheres.

In mice, wounds treated with hydrogels containing oxygen-releasing microspheres heal faster than wounds treated with this gel alone or without this gel

In addition, the epidermis of the wound treated with the oxygen-releasing microsphere hydrogel was thickest on the 8th day and thinnest on the 16th day, indicating that the wound was healed and inflammation was reduced

For the past 14 years, the first author Guan Ya has been developing this gel, which has nearly 70 different functions and chemical structures

"Before we put the gel into the skin tissue, it was a liquid, so it easily mixed with the microspheres," he said

One risk of delivering oxygen to the wound is delivering too much oxygen, which generates reactive oxygen species (ROS), which can damage or kill cells at high concentrations

Next, Guan's team plans to use this hydrogel in large animal models, and hopes to conduct human clinical trials in the future

Guan said: "This represents a new treatment that can accelerate the healing of chronic diabetic wounds without the use of drugs

doi: 10.