$1.2 million NIH grant to fund study of diabetic wound healing

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $1.2 million grant to a team of University of Louisville scientists to test a new treatment that may help more than 5 million patients who are debilitated by chronic wounds each year, many resulting from complications of diabetes.

UofL surgery professor Sufan Chien, M.D., leads the team, which will examine how wounds heal. Chien and his group are studying the idea that healing problems may be related to cells' ability to transport energy within tissue, rather than external factors like wound dressings.

Chien and his collaborators -- anatomy and neurobiology professor Michael Tseng, Ph.D., and surgery professors Gordon Tobin, M.D., and Kenneth Litwak, D.V.M., Ph.D., are studying the biochemical process where oxygen is converted to energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Chien has developed a unique way to transport ATP through the cell wall so that additional energy can be absorbed by the cell.

"Supplying energy directly to the cells for wound treatment has never been attempted before, and the relationship between increased energy and wound healing is unclear," Chien said.

The team's preliminary results with animal models show that direct delivery of energy to the cells markedly accelerated the wound-healing process, reducing the time needed for initial formation of new tissue from seven days to a single day.

In April, Chien presented this work at the 20th Annual Symposium on Advanced Wound Care and Wound Healing Society Meeting in Tampa, Fla.

The team believes that their work may be particularly applicable to diabetic foot problems, where reduced blood supply leads to difficulty in healing. Diabetic foot problems are estimated to cost as much as $20 billion each year in medical care and lost productivity.

Chien, who is also a member of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute, hopes that the technique's success can be translated to other medical problems that involve a lack of oxygen to tissue such as severe trauma, shock, stroke, chronic pulmonary diseases, heart attack, spinal cord injury and organ transplantation.