Abstract
Skin wounds are the physical damages of body surfaces and caused by burn injury, rupture, and surgical dissection. The wounds are usually healed by skin fibroblasts in dermis layer infiltrating into wound region and synthesized collagen matrixes. However, it has risks to result in skin diseases such as keloid if the healing process is disordered to cause excessive cell infiltration and collagen secretion in the wound area. Mechanical stimuli are supposed as one of the factors of keloid because the skins are subjected to mechanical stretching during the wound healing process. However, the pathogenesis of these diseases is still unclear. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of cyclic stretching stimuli on the morphology of Normal skin and keloid fibroblasts. In this study, to simulate a skin tissue in vitro, the fibroblasts-populated collagen gels were developed. The cell-populated gels were cyclically stretched during 4-days culture. Under conditions of cyclic stretch, the normal fibroblasts showed higher proliferation and migration compared to those under static condition, whereas the keloid-derived fibroblasts showed rounded shape in the gel and less proliferation and migration.
