Burns, Trauma and Wound Healing

The Burns, Trauma and Wound Healing group is investigating a variety of tools and strategies to understand and treat burn traumas and wounds.

The Center for Engineering in Medicine & Surgery (CEMS) at Massachusetts General Hospital has played a major role in developing tools for investigators studying burns and traumatic injuries, and for using these tools to better understand the mechanistic aspect of underlying biological phenomena.

These include microchips for point-of-care (POC) diagnosis, new tools and techniques for enhanced wound healing results, and mathematical models which can be used to predict the course of adverse incidents and systematically evaluate combination therapies.

Due to our proximity to the Shriners Burn Hospital in Boston, we have the unique capability of advancing our efforts from cell culture and animal studies to local and national clinical trials.

Examples of ongoing projects include:

• Microdevices to study neutrophil directional migration speed in burns
• Nanoparticle technologies based on elastin-like peptide fusion protein constructs that release bioactive peptides addressing multiple targets involved in wound healing
• Pulsed electric field treatment for inducing regeneration of normal skin and for the disinfection of burn wounds
• Development of quantitative and personalized methods to assess and treat the critical care patient
• Development of a mathematical liver model which can predict the organ response to metabolic supplements and treatments, with the goal of mitigating hypermetabolism

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Affiliated Faculty

• Martin Yarmush, MD, PhD
• Mehmet Toner, PhD
• Marianna Bei, PhD
• Korkut Uygun, PhD
• Basak Uygun, PhD
• O. Berk Usta, PhD

Publications

1. Vitalo, Antonia G., Sasikanth Gorantla, Jonathan G. Fricchione, John M. Scichilone, Jennifer Camacho, Steven M. Niemi, John W. Denninger, Herbert Benson, Martin L. Yarmush, and John B. Levine. "Environmental enrichment with nesting material accelerates wound healing in isolation-reared rats."Behavioural brain research 226, no. 2 (2012): 606-612.
   
   
2. Bonab, Ali, John Scichilone, Ronald Tompkins, John Levine, and Alan Fischman. "Isolation rearing reduces brain glucose metabolism after burn injury." Journal of Nuclear Medicine 54, no. supplement 2 (2013): 1770-1770.
   
   
3. Golberg, Alexander, G. Felix Broelsch, Stefan Bohr, Martin C. Mihm Jr, William G. Austen Jr, Hassan Albadawi, Michael T. Watkins, and Martin L. Yarmush. "Non-thermal, pulsed electric field cell ablation: A novel tool for regenerative medicine and scarless skin regeneration." Technology 1, no. 01 (2013): 1-7.
   
   
4. Wong, Ian Y., Sarah Javaid, Elisabeth A. Wong, Sinem Perk, Daniel A. Haber, Mehmet Toner, and Daniel Irimia. "Collective and individual migration following the epithelial–mesenchymal transition." Nature materials (2014).
   
   
5. Klein, Matthew B., Jeremy Goverman, Douglas L. Hayden, Shawn P. Fagan, Grace P. McDonald-Smith, Andrew K. Alexander, Richard L. Gamelli, Nicole S. Gibran, Celeste C. Finnerty, Marc G. Jeschke, Brett Arnoldo, Bram Wispelwey, Michael N. Mindrinos, Wezhong Xiao, Shari E. Honari, Philip H. Mason, David A. Schoenfeld, David N. Herndon, and Ronald G. Tompkins. "Benchmarking outcomes in the critically injured burn patient." Annals of surgery 259, no. 5 (2014): 833-841.