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UA Researcher Gets Federal Grant to Study Chronic Wound Biomarkers

2 min read

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a University of Arkansas biomedical engineer a $744,992 grant to improve imaging and early detection of chronic wounds and guide treatments, the university said Wednesday.

Kyle Quinn, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, uses multi-photon microscopy to create 3-D, micro-scale images of chronic wounds to measure different wound properties, and the grant will further develop his work.

The images reveal the metabolism and structure of skin layers and wound regions so that physicians can diagnose chronic wounds and determine appropriate treatment, according to a UA news release.

Quinn said clinicians struggle because there are not optimal methods to diagnose a wound or evaluate appropriate therapeutic interventions.

“It’s currently a wait-and-see approach,” Quinn said. “After an initial diagnosis or checkup, the patient will come back weeks later, and the clinician will evaluate whether the wound has closed or begun closing. If it hasn’t, then the clinician will have to try some other treatment.”

Data from a pilot phase of the research, funded by an earlier NIH grant and accepted for publication in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, indicated the ability to see differences in the metabolism of diabetic and non-diabetic wounds in frozen tissue samples, the UA said.

With the new grant, Quinn will non-invasively monitor individual wounds in live animals throughout the healing process. By the end of the three-year grant, he hopes to develop a suite of quantitative biomarkers to predict wound chronicity and to guide therapy with a long-term goal of testing the method in a clinical setting.

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