USA funds new ulcer treatment research

A new treatment is being developed by Professor Seth and Dr Ana Schor with funding from the USA that will provide new hope for patients with diabetes at risk from amputations of toes or feet.

Foot ulcers are often associated with diabetes and can prove an intractable problem, refusing to heal under conventional therapies. As a result diabetics are 16 times more likely to face amputations. But Seth and Ana Schor could hold the key to kick-starting the wound healing process. They have discovered a novel molecule, migration stimulating factor (MSF) involved in wound healing and such is the optimism surrounding their discovery and the quality of their research that they have received a grant of £600,000 from the American National Institutes of Health to develop a treatment based on it. It is relatively rare for the NIH to award grants, especially of this size, outside the USA.

The money, which will be paid over three years, will support a collaborative approach by a team of scientists and clinicians involved in tissue engineering.

Professor Schor: "This work could make an important contribution to the improvement of patient care, not just for those with non healing diabetic ulcers but for patients with other types of non-healing wounds such as bedsores in the elderly and the bedridden."

He explains: "The proper progression of wound healing relies upon the successive ingress of white blood cells and adjacent tissue cells into the wound site and their respective contributions to coverage of the wound bed, repair of the dermal connective tissue matrix and the establishment of a new blood supply - a process known as angiogenesis. Dysfunction in any of these events will impair the normal progression of wound healing and result in the generation of a chronic non-healing ulcer."

The team will investigate the role of MSF and explore how it, or the synthetic peptides derived from it, could be used to develop new treatments for chronic diabetic foot ulcers. A range of commercial applications could result.

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