Healing power of electricity raises hope of new treatments

Ian Sample, Science correspondent
Thursday July 27, 2006
The Guardian


Scientists have found how the body harnesses the power of electricity to heal cuts and grazes - an effect they manipulated to speed up wound healing dramatically.
In what amounts to the modern rediscovery of an old medical curiosity, the finding raises hopes for revolutionary treatments to patch up injured patients in hours instead of days.

In preliminary lab tests, researchers showed that by controlling the weak electrical fields that arise naturally at wound sites, they could direct cells to either close or open up a wound at the flick of a switch. By making the cells move faster, they were able to speed up wound healing by 50%.

The role of electricity in wound healing has received scant attention from the scientific community since the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond cut his arm and measured the electrical field across the wound in the mid-1800s. But in the journal Nature today, an international team of scientists led by Aberdeen University not only confirms the effect but also unravels the genetic machinery behind it.

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