From Bench to Bedside: development of new advanced therapies for healing chronic wounds

Professor Cowin is a leader in wound healing, internationally renowned for her work on the cytoskeletal protein Flightless I and how it negatively impacts tissue repair. She has been awarded over $20M in grants including from the US Department of Defence and continuous NHMRC funding.

Wounds are largely unrecognised, spiralling epidemic that affect millions of people world-wide. They are complex and involve temporal and spatial involvement of many different cell types and tissues. Science has played a major role in helping to understand the processes that are involved in complex would healing. Despite all best endeavours there are still limited wound care products on the market which actively stimulate healing and it is still not possible to regenerate skin after injury.

Wound researchers are focusing their understanding of the mechanism of wound repair on the development of new and innovative approaches to enable clinicians to provide effective solutions for patients with hard-to-heal wounds. These include the development of smart and responsive dressings, new antibody-based therapeutics, diagnostics tools, and technologies for sensing and treating wound infection.

In this presentation, some of the new and innovative approaches that are currently being developed in the laboratory will be described as well as the importance of having a multidisciplinary team to help create the new products and approaches that are needed for the management of wounds.