Washington: In a recent research, the scientists found that stem cells help skinclose recurring wounds faster.
These diseases come in many forms, from occasional rashes to chronic conditions such as dermatitis.
The researchers found that these stem cells, which replenish the skin’s outer layer take their cue from inflammation, the body’s own response to injury or infection.
The first bout of inflammation sensitizes these cells: the next time they sense it coming on, they respond more rapidly.
Whether burned by the sun, attacked by microbes, nicked by a paper cut or worse, the skin quickly becomes inflamed as the body seeks to halt the damage and initiate repair.
It has long been known that the immune system maintains a memory of inflammation to mount faster responses to recurrent infections. But scientists in the Fuchs’ lab suspected that other types of long-lived cells might similarly remember inflammation.
In experiments with mice, Shruti Naik, a postdoc, and Samantha B. Larsen, a graduate student, showed that wounds closed more than twice as fast in skin that had already experienced inflammation than in skin that had never been damaged, even if that initial inflammatory experience had occurred as long as six months earlier, the equivalent of about 15 years for a human.
Inflammation can sometimes run amok, as happens in autoimmune diseases like psoriasis, a disorder marked by scaly, red patches that often flare up repeatedly in the same spot. Larsen said, “Inflammatory diseases have long been blamed on immune cells that turn against the body. However, that is clearly not the only cause: Stem cells may also be important contributors.”
