ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Skin wounds are a major clinical problem in medicine. The wounds can be pathogenic such as the estimated annual 1.25 million burn victims or the 6.5 million patients with chronic skin ulcers, or they can be iatrogenic from surgical procedures. The average dermatologist performs 700 to 1000 skin biopsies or excisions per year and all surgical specialties must create skin wounds in the course of their routine surgical procedures. Wound healing in the skin is a complex orchestration of cellular processes that have been efficiently perfected throughout the eons of phylogeny. So many coordinated biological processes are invoked both simultaneously and in a regulated orderly fashion, that it has been likened to a recapitulation of gestation. Part of the problem with studying wound healing is dissecting out the processes independently and then seeing how they fit together and influence each other. In this chapter, we will review selected aspects of the known biology of skin wound healing, present some contemporary clinical therapies for skin wounds, and then end with newer scientific observations that provide insight into the biology of human skin wound healing.
