In human beings and domestic pets, scarring in the skin after trauma, surgery, burns or a sports injury is a major health problem, usually resulting in unsightly aesthetics, loss of function, restriction of tissue movement and/or growth and negative psychological effects.

Modern treatments are strictly empirical, unreliable and unpredictable. There are no prescription medicines for the prevention or treatment of dermal scarring. Skin wounds on early mammalian embryos heal flawlessly with no scars, whereas wounds to adult mammals are prone to scarring.

In scar treatment research, specialists are exploring the cellular and molecular differences between perfect healing in embryonic wounds and scar-forming healing in adult wounds. Important differences include the inflammatory response, which in embryonic wounds consists of fewer quantities of less differentiated inflammatory cells. This occurrence, together with high levels of morphogenetic molecules involved in skin growth and morphogenesis, means that the growth factor profile of an embryonic wound is very different from that of an adult wound.

These experiments resulted in scar-less healing in the adult subject and have lead to the recognition of appropriate therapeutic targets. It has been found that effective skin care markedly improves or completely avoids scarring during adult wound healing in experimental animals. Some of these new drugs have satisfyingly passed safety and other tests, such that they have entered human medical trials with approval from the appropriate regulatory authorities. Based on auspicious results from these volunteer experiments, the leading drugs have now entered human patient-based tests e.g. in skin graft donor sites.

Scientific Research on Scar Treatments

The hypothesis is that evolutionary factors have been exerted on medium sized, widespread, dirty wounds with high tissue damage e.g. bites, bruises and contusions. Modern wounds (e.g. produced by trauma or surgery) caused by sharp objects, are recent situations not previously found in nature, in which the evolutionary selected wound healing reactions are somewhat useless. It has been demonstrated that both healing with scarring and regeneration can occur within the same animal, including man, and of course within the same tissue, thereby suggesting that they share similar procedures and regulators.

Consequently, by slightly altering the proportion of growth factors present during adult wound healing, we can induce adult wounds to heal flawlessly with no scars, with accelerated healing and with no negative consequences, e.g. on wound strength or wound infection rates. This means that scarring may no longer be an inevitable consequence of modem injury or surgery, and that a fully new pharmaceutical concept to the prevention of human scarring is now possible. Not only skin suffers from scarring; they can appear in many other tissues as well.

Thus scar-improving drugs could have extensive benefits and prevent complications in various tissues, e.g. the prevention of blindness after scarring due to eye injury, facilitation of neuronal reconnections in the central and peripheral nervous system by the elimination of glial scarring, restitution of normal gut and reproductive function by preventing strictures and adhesions after injury to the gastrointestinal or reproductive tracts, and the recovery of locomotor function by preventing scarring in tendons and ligaments.