Nature: A new way to heal skin infections and wounds

Researchers at the University of Calgary have discovered a new treatment for bacterial skin infection.

"While moving our research from the lab to the clinic requires more experimentation and involves models more closely related to human disease, what's exciting is that we've made a fundamental discovery," Kratofil sai.

Traditionally, researchers thought that neutrophils and monocytes (white blood cells) were recruited to clear bacteria from the site of infection on the ski.

However, new research shows that monocytes alone can promote faster wound healin.

The surprising link between metabolic hormones and tissue repair

When you're hungry, your stomach produces ghrelin, and when you're full, fat cells produce leptin, which is also a hormon.

Using intravital microscopy to observe living cells is a specialty of the Kubes lab, and Kratofil is able to visualize immune responses to the .

Staphylococcus aureus is a bacteria commonly found on healthy body skin or nos.

After a .

Importance of the findings

"This study is important because it demonstrates a paradigm shift that challenges the current thinking on bacterial clearance by neutrophils and monocyte.

Principal investigator Kubes and his research team believe this study opens the door to the introduction of metabolic hormones (ghrelin and leptin) in the fields of immunology and microbiolog.

"For example, look at how ghrelin and leptin respond in sterile lesions or other disease models such as cancer, and see how these processes change when patients have multiple diseases at the same time, or conditions such as obesity and diabetes," Kubes sai.

next step

The next step for the researchers is to better understand the function of immune cells, such as neutrophils, during infectio.

The research team's interdisciplinary work is the product of 133 independent experiments conducted in collaboration with D.

article title

A monocyte–leptin–angiogenesis pathway critical for repair post-infection