How electricity can heal wounds three times faster

There is an old Swedish saying that one should never neglect a little hurt or a friend in need. For most people, a small wound does not cause serious complications, but many common diagnoses make wound healing much more difficult. People with diabetes, spinal injuries, or poor blood circulation have trouble healing wounds. This means an increased risk of infections and chronic injuries, which in the long run can have consequences as serious as amputation.

Now a group of researchers from Chalmers and the University of Freiburg have developed a method that uses electrical stimulation to speed up the healing process.

“Chronic wounds are a huge societal problem that we don’t hear much about. Our discovery of a method that can heal wounds up to three times faster may be a game changer for diabetics and the elderly, among others, who often suffer a lot from non-healing wounds,” says Maria Asplund, associate professor of bioelectronics at Chalmers University of Technology and lead researcher on the project.

Electrical guidance of cells for faster healing

The researchers worked from an old hypothesis that electrical stimulation of damaged skin can be used to heal wounds. The idea is that skin cells are electrotactic, meaning they ‘migrate’ directionally in electrical fields. This means that if an electric field is placed on a petri dish with skin cells, the cells stop moving randomly and start moving in the same direction. The researchers investigated how this principle can be used to electrically guide cells in order to make wounds heal faster. Using a small engineering chip, the researchers were able to compare wound healing on artificial skin, stimulating one wound with electricity and letting another heal without electricity. The differences were striking.

“We were able to show that the old hypothesis about electrical stimulation can be used to make wounds heal much faster. To study exactly how this works for wounds, we developed a kind of biochip in which we grow skin cells, which we then made small wounds. We then stimulated one wound with an electrical field, which clearly led to it healing three times faster than the wound that healed without electrical stimulation,” says Maria Asplund.

Hope for patients with diabetes

In the study, the researchers also focused on wound healing in relation to diabetes, a growing health problem around the world. One in 11 adults today has some form of diabetes according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Diabetes Federation.

“We looked at wound models of diabetes and investigated whether our method could be effective even in those cases. We saw that when we mimic diabetes in cells, wounds on the chip heal very slowly. However, with electrical stimulation we can increase the healing speed so that the cells affected by diabetes almost correspond to the healthy cells of the skin,” says Asplund.

Individualized treatment the next step

Chalmers researchers recently received a large grant that will allow them to continue their research in the field and, in the long term, will enable the development of wound healing products for consumers in the marketplace. Similar products have come out before, but more basic research is required to develop effective products that generate enough electric field strength and stimulate in the right way for each individual. This is where Asplund and his colleagues come into the picture:

“We are now looking at how the different skin cells interact during stimulation, in order to take a further step towards a realistic wound. We want to develop a concept to be able to ‘scan’ wounds and adapt the stimulation depending on the individual wound. We are convinced that that this is the key to effectively helping people with slow-healing wounds in the future,” says Asplund.

More about the study:

• “Bioelectronic Microfluidic Wound Healing: A Platform to Investigate Direct Current Stimulation of Injured Cell Collectives” was published in the journal. lab on a chip. The article was written by Sebastian Shaner, Anna Savelyeva, Anja Kvartuh, Nicole Jedrusik, Lukas Matter, José Leal, and Maria Asplund. The researchers work at the University of Freiburg in Germany and at Chalmers University of Technology.

• In their study, the researchers demonstrated that wound healing on electrically stimulated artificial skin was three times faster than on naturally healed skin. The electric field was low, around 200 mV/mm, and had no negative impact on the cells.
• The method the researchers developed is based on a microfluidic biochip on which artificial skin can be grown, stimulated with an electrical current, and studied in an efficient and controlled manner. The concept allows researchers to run multiple experiments in parallel on the same chip.
• The research project started in 2018 and is funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The project recently received additional funding to bring the research one step closer to the market and benefiting patients.