Skin damage often has a significant effect on QOL (quality of life), but in humans with low ability to regenerate tissues and organs, if the entire layer of skin, including the dermis, is significantly lost, the texture of the skin at the damaged site ( The texture), appendages (sweat glands and sebaceous glands), and color tone are not completely restored, and they are replaced with collagen-based fibrous tissue.This fibrous tissue (scar) is recognized as a so-called "scar" and has become a major issue in skin regeneration treatment (scar-free healing) research.
Therefore, a research group consisting of University of Tsukuba, Keio University, Shinshu University, Nippon Dental University, and Utsunomiya University focused on the newt, which is said to be able to completely regenerate various organs over a lifetime, and focused on the newt's skin regeneration process. Investigated in detail.
The results showed that newts can almost completely regenerate scar-free skin at various parts of the body, even if the entire skin layer is excised.Comparing this regeneration process with humans, the re-epidermalization of the wound is completed more quickly in the newt than in humans, the inflammatory response is kept low, and the granulation tissue (fibrotic connective tissue seen in the healing process) The formation was suppressed.
In humans, the epidermal stem cells localized at the cut end of the skin divide violently to form the epidermis that closes the wound, whereas the newt does not increase the frequency of division of the epidermal stem cells around the wound. In a wide area of the skin, the frequency of epidermal stem cell division was almost doubled.By adding new cells to the epidermis around the wound, the increased amount is pushed out to the wound, and the wound can be closed quickly.Since the fibrosis that results from granulation is thought to be the cause of scarring, it is possible that the newt's unique re-epidermalization principle has led to the avoidance of scarring.
The only thing is that the color pattern of the belly newt could not be completely recovered, but since humans do not have a color pattern like newts, the newt regeneration mechanism is considered to be sufficiently useful in human medicine. ..
Paper information:[Biomedicines] Skin Wound Healing of the Adult Newt, Cynops pyrrhogaster: A Unique Re-Epithelialization and Scarless Model
