New Insights into Scar Prevention

Dr. Erkki Ruoslahti

Bike accidents, C-sections and battlefield wounds can all leave scars. But those are only the scars you can see. Any tissue can scar (not just skin), making scar tissue more than a cosmetic problem. Heart muscle, for example, can scar after a heart attack, and the lungs, kidneys, the liver, and many other tissues can be damaged by inflammation. Current options for reducing scar formation require local intervention at the scarring site – plastic surgery, for example. But what if there was a pill you could take after an injury to prevent scar tissue from forming in the first place?
At Sanford-Burnham’s  at  and his team have developed a new prototype therapy that inhibits scarring in mice. The compound contains two elements discovered by the Ruoslahti laboratory. One is a peptide that homes in on new blood vessels that form during wound healing. The other is a naturally occurring protein called  which they prevents the buildup of fibrous connective tissue that causes scarring. The combination of the peptide and protein turns out to be particularly powerful.