Using Electricity to Heal

ganjadude writes to tell us that while the idea of using electricity to heal wounds was first reported 150 years ago by Emil Du Bois-Reymond, modern scientists may have found a way to practically apply this idea. From the article: "The researchers grew layers of mouse cells and larger tissues, such as corneas, in the lab. After 'wounding' these tissues, they applied varying electric fields to them, and found they could accelerate or completely halt the healing process depending on the orientation and strength of the field."

Comments

Awesome

[BilZ0r]

That's actually quite an awesome paper. It seems that when a wound is made, it makes a low resistance shunt across skin, which normally has a voltage difference across it. This stimulates wound healing activity. The current peaks at 10 microA cm-2 and persisted at 4-8 microA cm-2, with all the current vector pointing towards the wound center. This paper shows not only that that effect is easily demonstrated in vitro, but what are the molecular mediators of it, see the original article here.

Already out there

[bobllama]

There's already a company that's commercializing this - http://www.biofisica.com/. They have some pretty interesting information on their site for anyone interested in more detail. I'm not associated with them in anyway, just happened to see them present at an event once.

Re:Sick of 'science' reporting

[staeiou]

Why do these articles never EVER tell anything meaningful - like for example the strenght and orientation of the field they used with some simple data tables and statistics? Who has access to some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscrition to get the raw data?

So you think Nature (the journal TFA said it was published in) is some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscription? It is probably the most well known academic journal in existence, at least to the non-academic. And even if you are too poor to buy a subscription, I'm almost positive that every public library subscribes to Nature.

Re:I don't think this is new

[budgenator]

Bone (Calcanous) has two differnt types of cells, osteoclasts which "eat bone" and osteoblasts which lay down new bone. The osteoclasts tend to meander, eating the one randomly, but the osteoblasts tend to follow electrical currents in the bone. The calcium salts in the bone give off electrical currents by the piezoelectric effect which causes the bone to grow in the direction that makes it the strongest for the stresses it normaly recieves.