A new treatment being developed at the University of Dundee with funding from the USA holds out new hope for patients with diabetes who risk 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 University of Dundee husband and wife team Professor Seth and Dr 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 the tissue engineering initiative at Dundee. They are Professor Seth and Dr Ana Schor at the Dental School together with Professor Ray Newton, Dr Graham Leese and Dr Gareth Griffiths of the Diabetes Centre and Department of Surgery at Ninewells Hospital and Medical School.
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."
"MSF is involved in a number of these activities including the stimulation of cell migration, the deposition of a new connective tissue matrix and, perhaps most significantly, the induction of angiogenesis. All of these effects of MSF are mimicked by small synthetic molecules containing a specific sequence of three amino acids comprising the bioactive centre of MSF."
The Dundee 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.
Professor Seth, an American who has lived in the UK for 30 years, and his Spanish wife Dr Ana Schor were last year named Scotland's innovators of the year at the Unisys John Logie Baird awards for developing active wound dressings which induce rapid healing./ends
Contact Professor Seth Schor 01382 635991