Friday, December 21, 2012

Why is wound healing such a slow process? It's all about the energy

My lab does a lot of work on wound healing. In a petri dish, cells are capable of growing many times faster than they do in the body. So why do our wounds heal so slowly? These Swedish scientists got the crazy idea to calculate an energy balance for our bodies. Turns out that it costs an incredible amount of energy for our bodies to transport resources to wounded areas to feed new cell growth. Our bodies need to expend almost 5,000 calories to grow just 1 gram of new tissue! With all the energy it takes to just keep us alive every day, our bodies have only a small amount of excess energy left over to feed new cells, and so our wounds heal very slowly.  

It seems to me that there should be a way to short-circuit this process and make wounds heal much faster.

1 comment:

  1. Hello,