THERAPEUTIC ANGIOGENESIS IN DIABETES-RELATED IMPAIRED WOUND HEALING

Nowadays, diabetes represents one of the major diseases affecting developed countries. The disease and its complications determine a relevant socioeconomic burden, as well as negative effects on both lifespan and quality of life for patients, such as diabetic foot ulcers. They are caused by an impaired wound healing, determined by a reduction in angiogenesis, that is caused in turn by a reduction in pro-angiogenetic factors produced under diabetic condition. Here we show that we can revert this phenomenon in a murine model of diabetes-related impaired wound healing, treating the animals with relaxin hormone (able to increase VEGF levels) or antagomirs designed to inhibits mir-15b and mir-200b, both of them being micro-RNAs targering VEGF mRNA. The final results of this work demonstrate that both the strategies let us to achieve an improvement in wound healing under diabetic conditions.