There is an old Swedish saying that one should never neglect a small wound or a friend in need. For most people, a small wound does not lead to any serious complications, but many common diagnoses make wound healing far more difficult. People with diabetes, spinal injuries or poor blood circulation have impaired wound healing ability. This means a greater risk of infection and chronic wounds — which in the long run can lead to such serious consequences as amputation.

Now a group of researchers at Chalmers and the University of Freiburg have developed a method using electric stimulation to speed up the healing process.

“Chronic wounds are a huge societal problem that we don’t hear a lot about. Our discovery of a method that may heal wounds up to three times faster can be a game changer for diabetic and elderly people, among others, who often suffer greatly from wounds that won’t heal,” says Maria Asplund, Associate Professor of Bioelectronics at Chalmers University of Technology and head of research on the project.

Electric guidance of cells for faster healing

The researchers worked from an old hypothesis that electric stimulation of damaged skin can be used to heal wounds. The idea is that skin cells are electrotactic, which means that they directionally ‘migrate’ in electric fields. This means that if an electric field is placed in 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 the cells in order to make wounds heal faster. Using a tiny engineered chip, the researchers were able to compare wound healing in artificial skin, stimulating one wound with electricity and letting one heal without electricity. The differences were striking.

“We were able to show that the old hypothesis about electric stimulation can be used to make wounds heal significantly faster. In order to study exactly how this works for wounds, we developed a kind of biochip on which we cultured skin cells, which we then made tiny wounds in. Then we stimulated one wound with an electric field, which clearly led to it healing three times as fast as the wound that healed without electric stimulation,” Maria Asplund says.

Hope for diabetes patients

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

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

Individualised treatment the next step

The Chalmers researchers recently received a large grant which will allow them to continue their research in the field, and in the long run enable the development of wound healing products for consumers on the market. 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 her colleagues come into the picture:

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

More about the study:

• “Bioelectronic microfluidic wound healing: a platform for investigating 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 Chalmers University of Technology.

• In their study, the researchers showed that wound healing on artificial skin stimulated with electric current was three times faster than on the skin that healed naturally. The electric field was low, about 200 mV/mm, and did not have a 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 electric current and studied in an effective and controlled manner. The concept allows researchers to conduct multiple experiments in parallel on the same chip.
• The research project began in 2018 and is funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The project was recently granted more funding so the research can get one step closer to the market and the benefit of patients.

Located 250 million light-years away in the constellation of Serpens, the Serpent, Arp 220 is the 220th object in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. It is the nearest ULIRG and the brightest of the three galactic mergers closest to Earth.

The collision of the two spiral galaxies began about 700 million years ago. It sparked an enormous burst of star formation. About 200 huge star clusters reside in a packed, dusty region about 5,000 light-years across (about 5 percent of the Milky Way’s diameter). The amount of gas in this tiny region is equal to all of the gas in the entire Milky Way galaxy.

Previous radio telescope observations revealed about 100 supernova remnants in an area of less than 500 light-years. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovered the cores of the parent galaxies 1,200 light-years apart. Each of the cores has a rotating, star-forming ring blasting out the dazzling infrared light so apparent in this Webb view. This glaring light creates diffraction spikes — the starburst feature that dominates this image.

On the outskirts of this merger, Webb reveals faint tidal tails, or material drawn off the galaxies by gravity, represented in blue — evidence of the galactic dance that is occurring. Organic material represented in reddish-orange appears in streams and filaments across Arp 220.

Webb viewed Arp 220 with its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

Cresting the ridge of a submerged volcano, and stretching over several kilometers, the impressive reef structure was first recorded by Dr. Michelle Taylor (University of Essex, UK) and Dr. Stuart Banks (Charles Darwin Foundation, Ecuador) while diving in the deep-sea research submersible Alvin, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI, USA).This is the first time

HOV Alvin has explored this region within the GMR. The submersible recently completed upgrades that included improved high-quality still and ultra-high definition 4K video imaging systems, as well as enhanced sampling capabilities.

Taylor and Banks are part of an international group of scientists onboard the US Navy-owned and WHOI-operated research vessel R/V Atlantis, that is undertaking the Galápagos Deep 2023 expedition. The expedition is led by scientists at WHOI, University of Bristol (UK), Boise State University (USA), and University of Essex, in collaboration with the Galápagos National Park Directorate (GNPD), Charles Darwin Foundation and Ecuadorian Navy’s Oceanographic and Antarctic Institute (INOCAR). The expedition is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) in the UK.

Commenting on this groundbreaking discovery, the Minister of Environment of Ecuador, Jose Antonio Dávalos said: “This is encouraging news. It reaffirms our determination to establish new marine protected areas in Ecuador and to continue promoting the creation of a regional marine protected area in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. The richness of the yet explored depths of our ocean is another reason to strive towards achieving the commitments of the Global Ocean Alliance 30×30, which aims to protect at least 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, aligning sustainable economic activities with conservation.”

Prior to this discovery, Wellington Reef off the coast of Darwin Island in the far north of the archipelago was thought to be among the few structural shallow coral reefs in the Galápagos Islands to have survived the 1982-83 El Niño event. The new discovery made during dives by scientists in the HOV Alvin shows that sheltered deep-water coral communities have likely persisted for centuries in the depths of the GMR, supporting rich, diverse, and potentially unique marine communities.

Dr Stuart Banks, Senior Marine Researcher at the Charles Darwin Foundation, and national observer on this expedition adds: “The captivating thing about these reefs is that they are very old and essentially pristine, unlike those found in many other parts of the world’s oceans. This gives us reference points to understand their importance for marine natural biodiversity heritage, connectivity with regional MPAs, as well as their role in providing goods and services such as carbon cycling and fisheries. It also helps us reconstruct past ocean environments to understand modern climate change. Open waters cover over 95% of the known GMR, of which less than 5% have been explored through modern research expeditions. It’s very likely there are more reef structures across different depths waiting to be explored. We’ll forge ahead with the Galapagos National Park Directorate and partners to help ensure that such newly discovered habitats are

folded into the GMR and Hermandad Marine Reserve planning process and recognized as part of their considerable world heritage value.”

Dr Michelle Taylor, co-lead of the expedition and Chair of the Deep Sea Society from the University of Essex notes the importance of this discovery for deep sea habitats: “The discovered reefs are novel for several reasons — in shallow reefs where finding 10-20% of coral cover would be considered a relatively unhealthy reef, in the deep-sea this is the norm. Dead coral skeletons making up the remaining 80-90% still provide homes for a huge diversity of life, which is less reliant on the live sections of coral. However, the reefs we’ve found in the last few days have 50-60% live coral in many areas, which is very rare indeed. They are pristine and teeming with life — pink octopus, batfish, squat lobsters and an array of deep-sea fish, sharks, and rays. These newly discovered reefs are potentially of global significance — a canary in the mine for other reefs globally — sites which we can monitor over time to see how pristine habitats evolve with our current climate crisis.”

Dr Daniel J. Fornari, co-lead of the expedition, marine geologist, and Emeritus Research Scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who has mapped and sampled the marine environment in the Galápagos for over 20 years notes: “Exploring, mapping and sampling the Galápagos Platform with Alvin and Atlantis represents an opportunity to apply 21^st-century deep-submergence and seafloor mapping technologies and innovative deep-sea imaging techniques to reveal the beauty and complexity of the volcanic and biological processes that makes the Galápagos so unique.”

Scientific findings such as this help inform effective management and conservation actions. The discovery also comes at a time when the Eastern Tropical Pacific countries of Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Ecuador are actively collaborating through a regional Marine Corridor (CMAR) initiative to protect and responsibly manage the ocean upon which we as people depend. Newly declared MPAs such as the Hermandad Marine Reserve (HMR) now connect seamounts in Ecuadorian waters to offshore marine environments such as Costa Rica’s Cocos Island National Park. Natural oceanographic and marine processes transcend national boundaries, which underscores the need for special measures that protect foraging grounds, migratory routes for marine life and sustain responsible fisheries.

Video of reef: https://youtu.be/yttzKl95TiQ

For more information about the expedition objectives, scientists and the R/V Atlantis and HOV Alvin, please visit: https://galapagosdeep2023.com/