Bioengineered Wound Healing Skin Models: The Role of Immune Response and Endogenous ECM to Fully Replicate the Dynamic of Scar Tissue Formation In Vitro

Abstract

The healing of deep skin wounds is a complex phenomenon evolving according with a fine spatiotemporal regulation of different biological events (hemostasis, inflammation, proliferation, remodeling). Due to the spontaneous evolution of damaged human dermis toward a fibrotic scar, the treatment of deep wounds still represents a clinical concern. Bioengineered full-thickness skin models may play a crucial role in this direction by providing a deep understanding of the process that leads to the formation of fibrotic scars. This will allow (i) to identify new drugs and targets/biomarkers, (ii) to test new therapeutic approaches, and (iii) to develop more accurate in silico models, with the final aim to guide the closure process toward a scar-free closure and, in a more general sense, (iv) to understand the mechanisms involved in the intrinsic and extrinsic aging of the skin. In this work, the complex dynamic of events underlaying the closure of deep skin wound is presented and the engineered models that aim at replicating such complex phenomenon are reviewed. Despite the complexity of the cellular and extracellular events occurring during the skin wound healing the gold standard assay used to replicate such a process is still represented by planar in vitro models that have been largely used to identify the key factors regulating the involved cellular processes. However, the lack of the main constituents of the extracellular matrix (ECM) makes these over-simplistic 2D models unable to predict the complexity of the closure process. Three-dimensional bioengineered models, which aim at recreating the closure dynamics of the human dermis by using exogenous biomaterials, have been developed to fill such a gap. Although interesting mechanistic effects have been figured out, the effect of the inflammatory response on the ECM remodelling is not replicated yet. We discuss how more faithful wound healing models can be obtained by creating immunocompetent 3D dermis models featuring an endogenous ECM.