Burn injuries are among the most expensive to treat, with their healthcare costs surpassed only by the care of premature newborns and organ transplant patients. These types of wounds can also lead to significant lifelong complications, such as infections, pain, and scarring, if they are not treated properly and in a timely manner. Vulnerable populations like children and the elderly can also face additional burdens during treatment and recovery. This leaves surgeons like Division of Acute Care and Regional General Surgery Associate Professor Dr. Angela Gibson looking for effective, safe, inexpensive, and easy-to-use solutions for treating burn injuries. With a new three-year, $600,000 Collaborative Health Sciences Program award from the Wisconsin Partnership Program, Gibson and her co-project leader, Dr. Brian Pogue in the UW Department of Medical Physics, will be able to test whether an established and widely-used treatment called photodynamic therapy (PDT) could be adapted for use in burn wound care.
“PDT is a non-invasive treatment that uses light and special chemicals to treat skin issues like tumors and infections,” explained Gibson. “We thought that if we pair PDT with the right dose of the right chemical, it might also work to speed up the healing process for burns. The chemical we’ll be using is called Protoporphyrin IX, or PpIX, and it is made naturally in the body.”
The research team plans to test out the combination of PDT and PpIX in an animal model of burn wounds. “When we’re developing a new way to treat injuries and disease, we first have to find out if it is safe. The best way to do that is to test it in an animal model, and with burn injuries pigs are the best animal model because their skin is the closest to human skin,” said Gibson. “The Center for Biomedical Swine Research and Innovation here at the UW is a fantastic resource to ensure we carry out our animal studies in state-of-the-art facilities with amazing veterinary staff overseeing the experiments.”
Along with Dr. Aiping Liu, a scientist in Dr. Gibson’s lab, Drs. Gibson and Pogue will be testing different concentrations of topically-applied 5-ALA (a chemical that is known to enhance the body’s own production of PpIX), how long to leave it on the skin, how much light energy to use, and how well this treatment works at different stages of burn wound healing. They also plan to evaluate whether the PpIX that is naturally produced by the body can be used for this treatment.
“We’ll be using the results of this study as preliminary data for a future clinical trial to test PpIX-PDT in human burn wounds,” said Gibson. “Ultimately, our goal is to improve wound outcomes and quality of life for patients with burn injuries by giving them access to a new therapy that stimulates the body to help itself and decreases scar formation. We also hope that the results will provide some important insights into burn wound healing that can then be translated to the treatment of other types of wounds.”