UC San Diego

Suturing is a primary technique for wound closure, and it is used to keep body tissues together after injuries or surgeries. There is a wide variety of suturing including skin suturing, blood vessel suturing and tendon suturing. Despite of new developments and suture modifications, the outcome of the suturing needs further improvement. One of the challenges impacting the outcomes of suturing is the prolonged inflammatory process of healing when standard of care suturing is used. Tendons, for example, are usually repaired using sutures, and despite new developments and suture modifications, the outcomes of these repairs are not satisfactory as 25% of patients complain about their clinical outcomes and 7.7% need further surgeries as the repairs re-rupture. It has been shown in variety of studies using histological assessments of repaired tendon, that there is a distinct acellular zone in the tissues surrounding the sutures that could be the cause of the prolonged inflammatory activity leading into the weakening of tendon repair site. The purpose of this article is to focus primarily on MSC-coated bioactive sutures enhance the process of wound healing by providing sufficient resources to the wounded area. In this article, literature studying the effect of MSCs bioactive sutures on wound healing will be discussed, and further analysis and recommendations for future work will be provided.