2023-06-01 17:03:31
The model designed by doctoral student Mathias Lemarchand under the supervision of Professor François Berthod reproduces the skin of a diabetic in the laboratory.
The researchers used two types of cells found in the dermis – fibroblasts and keratinocytes – and treated them with a chemical that increases the attachment of sugars to proteins (a process called glycation) to replicate the effects of very high sugar levels. in the blood that characterizes diabetes.
The mice that are currently being used to study the healing of these wounds are very imperfect models, since they heal their wounds in a different, and much more efficient, way than humans. The transfer of acquired knowledge to humans is therefore limited.
It was therefore important to have a model closer to human reality to advance the hopes of healing these ulcers which, in the worst cases, can lead to the amputation of a limb.
“To be able to find new molecules that can better treat these ulcers, the really important thing is to develop models that can reproduce the reality of the diabetic ulcer in vitro,” summarized Professor Berthod.
Dr. Berthod’s team had already developed a skin model “which worked well”, he said, to study wound healing. This time they wanted to push their work a little further by developing a model closer to the reality of diabetics.
It is very difficult to reproduce such diabetic skin in the laboratory, explained Professor Berthod. Diabetes is a slow-growing disease and it is high blood sugar that, over the years, eventually hinders the skin’s healing abilities. As you cannot keep a skin model in the laboratory for years, it was necessary to find a method “to speed up the process (…) to get as close as possible to the situation in the patient”, said the researcher .
And that’s what they managed to do.
“The ultimate proof that it works is that when we compare our treated model (…) to induce the negative effects of hyperglycemia and a normal model, when we compare the two, we see that indeed, when we have induced this glycation treatment, we have a negative impact on the closure of the wound,” said Professor Berthod.
This model will now make it possible to test molecules that could protect against the harmful effects of hyperglycemia. One could envisage the development, one day, of a topical treatment which would be applied directly to ulcers to facilitate healing.
The researchers are currently working on a model that would directly use the patient’s cells to be able to model the effect of these molecules. This presents another significant challenge, since these cells are so diseased that it is very difficult to grow them in the laboratory into full skin.
“Our goal is to develop approaches that are as inexpensive as possible, then as accessible as possible, because we know that the problem of diabetes is increasingly important, said Professor Berthod. The number of patients is increasing more and more and there are all sorts of problems associated with these patients. The more patients you have to treat, the more the approaches you develop need to be inexpensive and easy to apply.”
The findings of this study have been published in the scientific journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering.
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