ARE TUMORS ALL BAD? TUMORS INSPIRE A CURE FOR DIABETIC WOUNDS

 

Diabetes is a prominent disease in India. As of 2019, 77 million individuals were affected by diabetes and it is estimated to rise to 134 million people by 2045. Diabetic patients suffer from impaired wound healing, about 100 million people worldwide are affected by it. The impaired wound healing is due to the dysfunction and imbalance in the inflammatory characteristics of macrophages i.e. proinflammatory macrophages that initiate the healing process do not turn into anti-inflammatory macrophages and therefore more inflammatory monocytes are activated and cause a pause in healing.

A recent study has stated that this can be rectified by the use of Tumor-Associated Macrophages (TAMs) which tend to have the requirements for wound healing. TAMs present in the tumor microenvironment promote the proliferation of cells by high amounts of paracrine secretion of growth factors and anti-inflammatory cytokines. In addition to that, they also ensure angiogenesis, vascularisation, extracellular matrix remodeling, and switching off inflammatory phenotypes in immunocytes to ensure the growth of tumors. These ideal qualities of the TAM, motivated researchers to mirror its properties for treating wounds in diabetic patients. The researchers ultimately developed autologous human monocytes that could mimic the tumor-associated macrophages to promote diabetic wound healing. 

Normal macrophages were taught to become TAMs by cultivating them with TAM's conditional medium. These TAM Educated Macrophages (TAMEMs) showed higher suppression of inflammation, stimulation of angiogenesis and activation of fibroblasts in vitro and also showed significant wound healing in diabetic mice. Although these TAMEMs showed remarkable healing properties, they could not be used as a clinical therapy since TAMs cannot be constructed for patients who do not have tumors, and inducing tumor-derived cells into patients has its risks. 

Hence, the researchers identified a cocktail of human recombinant proteins that mimicked the ideal qualities of TAMs which could teach human peripheral blood monocytes to become cytokine-induced autologous human TAMEMs to treat diabetic wounds. This proves an immense potential to be translated into therapeutic cells to elevate wound healing in diabetic patients since it is prepared from autologous cells and does not involve any tumor-derived components. 

REFERENCE

Mu R, Zhang Z, Han C, Niu Y, Xing Z, Liao Z, et al. Tumor-associated macrophages-educated reparative macrophages promote diabetic wound healing. EMBO Mol Med. 2023 Feb 8;15(2).
doi: 10.15252/emmm.202216671. Epub 2022 Dec 21. PMID: 36541165; PMCID: PMC9906426.

IMAGE CREDITS

Cover Image: https://www.the-scientist.com/cancer-cells-gather-speed-in-thicker-fluids-70781