Chronic Wound Care 

EMERGING PROGRAM

Under the leadership of Executive Director Chandan Sen, PhD, OSU Medical Center’s new Comprehensive Wound Center (CWC) is becoming a national leader in research that translates to innovative treatments for chronic wounds.

“Our philosophy is to take science from the laboratory to the patient care arena,” says Chandan Sen, PhD, who also is vice chair for research in the OSU Department of Surgery and deputy director of the OSU Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute. He notes that chronic wound healing is an $8 billion industry nationwide; in 2004, Ohio State University Hospital recorded nearly 6,500 patient visits for wound-healing services.

Sen was recruited to Ohio State from the University of California-Berkeley and San Francisco, which had one of the leading wound-healing programs in the nation. In three years, he has moved OSU’s surgical research programs from 44th to 17th in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding.

Sen and colleagues in the Department of Surgery are leading a multicenter “Gene Screen” study that searches for biological clues – hidden in the genomics of blood vessels – about why some wounds heal and some do not. This study, which will screen the human genome to identify patterns of gene expression in vascular cells, is being conducted in partnership with National Healing Corporation (NHC), a private Florida-based company that manages 20 percent of the nation’s wound-healing centers, logging 250,000 patient visits per year.

Sen says wound healing has several dimensions, but one of the fundamental obstacles to healing is insufficient oxygen. “When blood vessels at the wound site have been damaged or destroyed,” he explains, “you can put in whatever growth factors, such as cytokines, that you want, and you can do tissue grafts and apply other treatments, but if the wound is not properly oxygenated, healing runs out of gas.”

Sen and colleagues at OSU and the University of  California at San Francisco recently completed an NIH-funded study demonstrating that, at appropriate levels, reactive oxygen species generated from oxygen can support wound healing. The study also demonstrated that wounds can generate their own low concentration of hydro-gen peroxide, which plays a positive role in healing.

“This study sets a new paradigm supporting the role of reactive oxygen species as a signal for repair,” Sen says, adding that the findings also underscore the importance of ensuring that wounds are properly oxygenated.

Sen has been collaborating with OSU scientists Jay Zweier, MD, professor of Internal Medicine and director of the OSU Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute, and Periannan Kuppusamy, PhD, professor of Internal Medicine, in developing oxygen-imaging capabilities that will allow clinicians to accurately and painlessly measure oxygen present at the wound site.

The CWC offers care at two locations: a clinic at University Hospital East and at a spacious new facility in the OSU Martha Morehouse Medical Plaza. “Our wound-healing clinics treat more than 500 patients each month,” Sen says. “The new clinic in the Morehouse Plaza is providing an even greater opportunity for clinical research.”