Background
The treatment of extensive and/or chronic skin wounds is a widespread and costly public health problem. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been proposed as a potential cell therapy for inducing wound healing in different clinical settings, alone or in combination with biosynthetic scaffolds. Among them, silk fibroin (SF) seeded with MSCs has been shown to have increased efficacy in skin wound healing experimental models.
Conclusions
These findings indicate that Wj-MSCs transplanted in the wound bed on a silk fibroin scaffold contribute to the generation of a well-organized and vascularized granulation tissue, enhance reepithelization of the wound, and reduce the formation of fibrotic scar tissue, highlighting the potential therapeutic effects of Wj-MSC-based tissue engineering approaches to non-healing wound treatment.
Methods
In this report, we investigated the wound healing effects of electrospun SF scaffolds cellularized with human Wharton's jelly MSCs (Wj-MSCs-SF) using a murine excisional wound splinting model.
Results
Immunohistopathological examination after transplant confirmed the presence of infiltrated human fibroblast-like CD90-positive cells in the dermis of the Wj-MSCs-SF-treated group, yielding neoangiogenesis, decreased inflammatory infiltrate and myofibroblast proliferation, less collagen matrix production, and complete epidermal regeneration. Conclusions: These findings indicate that Wj-MSCs transplanted in the wound bed on a silk fibroin scaffold contribute to the generation of a well-organized and vascularized granulation tissue, enhance reepithelization of the wound, and reduce the formation of fibrotic scar tissue, highlighting the potential therapeutic effects of Wj-MSC-based tissue engineering approaches to non-healing wound treatment.