Inflammation in Wound Repair:

Wound healing is a highly dynamic process and involves complex interactions of extracellular matrix molecules, soluble mediators, various resident cells, and infiltrating leukocyte subtypes. Inflammatory response is a certain consequence of tissue injury. Inflammation is essential to the establishment of cutaneous homeostasis injury and specific subsets of inflammatory cell lineages and the cytokine network orchestrating inflammation associated with tissue repair. The healing process contains three phases that overlap in time and space: inflammation, tissue formation, and tissue remodeling. Throughout the inflammatory phase, platelet aggregation is tailed by infiltration of leukocytes into the wound site. In tissue formation, epithelialization and newly formed granulation tissue, consisting of endothelial cells, macrophages and fibroblasts, begin to cover and fill the wound area to restore tissue integrity. These (synthesis, remodeling, and deposition of structural extracellular matrix molecules) are indispensable for initiating repair and progression into the healing state. Cellular responses to injury involve direct cell to cell and cell to matrix interactions, as well as the indirect crosslink between different cells by soluble mediators.

The role of inflammation, the key involvement of fibroblasts, myofibroblasts, keratinocytes are the great factors that tissue engineering provides to improve wound healing. Hippocrates recognized that “Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.” This Perspectives show the great new opportunities for improving the process of healing wounds.