• Da-Hai Hu.
• Department of Burns and Cutaneous Surgery, Xijing Hospital, the Fourth Military Medical University, Xi'an 710032, China.
• Zhonghua Shao Shang Za Zhi. 2010 Aug 1;26(4):247-50.

AbstractThe restoration of destroyed skin tissue in extensive deep burn injury has been perplexing burn surgeons for a long time due to impossibility of de novo formation of true skin in the process of burn wound healing with the current treatment methods. Stem cells possess the capacity to repair the damaged tissue through regeneration of the original structure and function, and it is considered as the expected ideal outcome of burn wound healing and also the final goal of multidisciplinary wound managements. In the skin tissue, the resident stem cells do exist, and they retain an autonomous self-renewal potential, and they respond to guiding signals to differentiate in repairing burn wound. Besides, the remote mesenchymal stem cells and the adjacent adipose-derived stem cells have been shown to be involved in burn wound healing. The basic studies demonstrated that the microenvironmental feature or extracellular regulators, the selective activation of intracellular signaling pathways, and the expression of specific genes have a significant influence on the proliferation, differentiation or function of stem cells in wound repair. Therefore, further investigation and manipulation of the molecular mechanisms by which stem cells could participate well in regenerating skin tissue would be a valuable and promising way in burn wound treatment. The recent discovery of reprogramming a mature body cell into a pluripotent stem cell, which can then be converted to any type of human body cell sheds a new light to regenerative medicine. Stem cell-based regeneration is offering the next coming frontier of medical therapy by yielding new treatment through delivery of pluripotent stem cells to achieve structural and functional repair in the damaged tissues or organs due to trauma or chronic diseases. Therefore, it is a pressing task for us to expedite the study on the role and utility of stem cells in burn wound treatment, especially aiming to explore the possibility in regenerating skin appendages or even the entire structure of the normal skin, and avoiding the formation of hypertrophic scar or chronic wound after burn.

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