More than six million people in the U.S. suffer from persistent wounds — open sores that never seem to heal or, once apparently healed, return with a vengeance. The bedridden elderly and infirm are prone to painful and dangerous pressure ulcers, and diabetics are susceptible to wounds caused by a lack of blood flow to the extremities.

A group led by Dr. Yasunori Okada at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan has demonstrated that matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are instrumental in wound healing. Their report can be found in the August 2009 issue of The American Journal of Pathology.

Treatment of chronic wounds is a continuing clinical problem and socio-economic burden with diabetic foot ulcers alone costing the NHS £300 million a year. Scientists in Bristol have found that human foetal stem cells can effectively be used to treat back leg ischaemic ulcers in a model of type 1 diabetes.

A recent study shows that popular fish oil supplements have an effect on the healing process of small, acute wounds in human skin. But whether that effect is detrimental, as researchers initially suspected, remains a mystery.

A report by scientists from The Netherlands published online in The FASEB Journal identifies a compound in human saliva that greatly speeds wound healing.

New Survey by Greystone Associates Examines Impact on Surgical and Wound Management Market.

Researchers have solved a longstanding mystery about how flexing muscles “tell” nearby blood vessels that they need more blood to perform, according to a study published Feb. 15 in the journal Circulation Research.

A new study in Artificial Organs tested the effects of a wound dressing created with hair follicular cells. The findings reveal that skin substitutes using living hair cells can increase wound healing.

Surgeons are being advised to consider the supermarket as well as the drugs cupboard when it comes to effective wound healing, according to a research review published in the October issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice.

Sea cucumbers are the champions of organ regrowth because they direct their wound healing abilities towards restoring their organs, according to research published in the online open access journal, BMC Developmental Biology.

The effectiveness and value of an increasingly popular treatment used in the treatment of long term wounds are questioned in this month’s Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin (DTB)

A preliminary study suggests that topical application of a gel made from platelets in healthy individuals' own blood may help wounds heal more quickly and completely, according to a report in the May/June issue of Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.