title: Preventing Scars after Injury with Partial Irreversible Electroporation.
abstract: Preventing the formation of hypertrophic scars, especially those that are a result of major trauma or burns, would have enormous impact in the fields of regenerative and trauma medicine. In this report, we introduce a noninvasive method to prevent scarring based on nonthermal partial irreversible electroporation. Contact burn injuries in rats were treated with varying treatment parameters to optimize the treatment protocol. Scar surface area and structural properties of the scar were assessed with histology and non-invasive, longitudinal imaging with polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography. We found that partial irreversible electroporation using 200 pulses of 250 V and 70 μs duration, delivered at 3 Hz every 20 days during a total of five therapy sessions after the initial burn injury, resulted in a 57.9% reduction of the scar area compared with untreated scars and structural features approaching those of normal skin. Unlike humans, rats do not develop hypertrophic scars. Therefore, the use of a rat animal model is the limiting factor of this work.
authors.affiliation: Center for Engineering in Medicine, Department of Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Shriners Burns Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Porter School of Environmental Studies, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. Electronic address: agolberg@tauex.tau.ac.il.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Golberg
authors.affiliation: Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 50 Blossom Street, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Villiger
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: Saiqa
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Khan
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA.
authors.forename: Kyle P
authors.initials: KP
authors.lastname: Quinn
authors.affiliation: Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 50 Blossom Street, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: William C Y
authors.initials: WCY
authors.lastname: Lo
authors.affiliation: Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 50 Blossom Street, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: Brett E
authors.initials: BE
authors.lastname: Bouma
authors.affiliation: Department of Dermatology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Martin C
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Mihm
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: William G
authors.initials: WG
authors.lastname: Austen
authors.affiliation: Center for Engineering in Medicine, Department of Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Shriners Burns Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ.
authors.forename: Martin L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Yarmush
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002056:Burns / Q000150:complications* / Q000473:pathology; D017439:Cicatrix, Hypertrophic / Q000209:etiology / Q000473:pathology / Q000517:prevention & control*; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D018274:Electroporation / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D041623:Tomography, Optical Coherence