CRI听力: New Gel to Heal Skin Ulcers

Anchor: UK scientists say new results show a gel can dramatically heal the most unsightly and painful skin ulcers which cripple millions of people around the world each year.

Our reporter Li Dong has the details.



Chronic ulcers occur when our bodies degenerate through old age, trauma or disease, particularly diabetes. Getting blood to flow through to our legs becomes harder as our arteries and veins begin to narrow.

Scientists believe a gel can interfere with the way our cells communicate with one another.

It's the result of Professor David Becker's investigations at the University College in London. Becker has focused on the microscopic channels which allow cells to communicate with each other.

He has discovered they give out a message which can have a profound effect on healing. To make healing cells migrate towards a wound to heal it a protein needs to be switched off. He says if it isn't switched off, it will not heal.

"In hard to heal wounds like diabetic wounds and ulcers, there's a massive over expression of this protein. The wounds don't heal, so we've developed an anti sense gel which can turn this protein off and just this protein, at the wound site and encourage the cells to crawl forward and heal the wound."

According to the researchers, using the gel is very simple. The process can normally be carried out during a home visit by a nurse.

The gel called Nexagon is injected onto the surface of the ulcerated skin transforming from a thin liquid to a tacky gel as soon as it touches the patient. The treated part is then bound with compression bandages which aim to counteract the raised pressure in the leg veins.

Doctors say when using the bandages and gel together they saw a rapid improvement in patients with even the largest wounds. Of the 98 in the study, two thirds saw a massive reduction in their wound size within a month, the rest healed completely.

The scope for a treatment like this is huge. Studies in medical journals claim that in the US alone, venous leg ulcers cost three billion dollars in medical treatment and another two million working days. In the UK it's also estimated to cost billions.

Surgeon Toby Richards see hundreds of patients at his diabetic clinic each week. He says:

"Diabetic ulcers are the worst ulcers to treat. In a six month period you'll only anticipate that forty per cent of leg ulcers in patients with diabetes will heal. Furthermore, in someone who's got an ulcer in diabetes, this is the most frequent cause of leg amputation in the western world. On average, ten to twenty per cent of people will lose their leg as a consequence of infection in a diabetic foot ulcer."

Becker is convinced that the gel could benefit many patients, even some with serious cases. So far the trial has concentrated on the venous ulcers, but he says

"We're going for the people that are very hard to heal, with persistent ulcers that are not healing. These are people typically from their late forties up until their eighties and their wounds are there for months, or years."

For CRI, I am Li Dong