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The wound site is a miniature battleground, where the host tissue must stop the loss of blood and body fluid, fight off infection, restore tissue integrity and minimize loss of function to the damaged tissue. This is accomplished through a cascade of cellular and biochemical events. It is clear that part of the communication machinery that coordinates these events is the expression of soluble signaling molecules, the cytokines, which are synthesized and released by effector cells to act upon their targets. One of the most important groups of these molecules to be investigated during the last decade is cellular growth factors [11]. As their name implies, these molecules are able, at least in cell culture, to bring about dramatic changes in the rate of growth of cells or the production of cell products, such as extracellular matrix. Because of these special properties of growth factors, the hypothesis that they might accelerate the process of wound repair was tested and confirmed in a wide variety of experimental animal models [5, 6]. Subsequently, many of these purified growth factors, including transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β), platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), epidermal growth factor (EGF) and basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF), have gone on to clinical trials that have shown partial success [7, 14, 16, 20, 23, 25]. Often, these trials have used prodigious quantities of the growth factors, yet usually the outcome has not been impressive enough to warrant further pursuit of the compounds as clinical materials. |
