Smart wound dressing speeds up healing by triggering body’s own repair signals

A bioinspired material, developed by scientists at Imperial College London, accelerates wound healing and the repair of human skin.

The material captures the body’s own healing proteins, releasing them only when repair cells pull on them, delivering healing signals precisely where and when they are needed.  

In new research published in Nature Materials, the dressings helped wounds on a mouse model close faster and improved the repair of human skin tissue in laboratory tests - the first time this mechanism has been shown to work in living, repairing tissue. 

Wounds like diabetic foot ulcers, burns, and traumatic injuries affect millions of people and cost the NHS billions every year. Wounds that fail to heal fully leave patients in pain and at risk of infection, putting strain on health systems. 

The researchers say the approach could one day reduce the need for costly manufactured drugs by using repair molecules harvested directly from a patient's own wounds or blood. 

From concept to living tissue 

The work builds on an earlier Imperial discovery first published in 2019, which demonstrated the concept in simple laboratory cell cultures - a carefully controlled environment very different from the complexity of a real wound. By moving beyond cell culture into biologically complex environments, the research marks a major step towards clinical application. 

By testing the material in rat bone injuries, mouse skin wounds, and living human skin maintained in the laboratory, the researchers showed that the mechanism can function in wounded tissue across different biological settings. 

Dr Magdalene Ho from Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering and lead author of the study said: “What excites me most is that this works in living human skin. We can see repair cells migrating into the wound dressing and confirm the material is engaging with human biology. That result makes me optimistic that this approach has a future in the clinic.” 

A smarter way to deliver healing signals 

Healing depends on growth factors - proteins that tell cells to move, multiply, form blood vessels, and rebuild tissue. In hard-to-heal wounds, these signals are often too weak, come at the wrong time, or break down before they can finish the job. Current treatments try to fix this by giving large doses of growth factor drugs through sprays or creams, but these proteins break down quickly and can leave the wound before they can help. Other approaches use materials to support the wound structurally but do not provide the biological instructions that growth factors provide. 

Instead of flooding the wound with drugs or just acting as a support, the new material selects specific healing proteins from the wound or blood and keeps them inactive. When a repair cell moves into the wound and pulls on the dressing, the proteins are released and delivered right to that cell at the precise time and place where repair is happening. 

This bioinspired design allows the system to work at doses hundreds to thousands of times lower than conventional growth-factor delivery approaches, and more than 2,000 times lower than a clinical growth-factor product. 

Dr Ben Almquist, Associate Professor in Bioengineering, Co-Director of the Imperial Network of Excellence in Wound Healing and Regeneration, and senior author of the study said: "What particularly stands out with this research is that the patient's own body becomes the pharmacy. We are not delivering a manufactured drug and hoping it survives long enough to work. We are capturing what the body is already making and giving it back to the cells that need it, by encoding intelligence directly into the material, activated by the one signal guaranteed to be present right where healing is happening: the physical force of a cell pulling on its surroundings." 

Mr Shehan Hettiaratchy OBE, Professor of Practice in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Imperial, who was not involved with the research, said: "This is a major breakthrough in wound healing. We have known for a long time that the body is the best healer of wounds unless that system is disrupted. What this technology does is harness that system to get it back on track to heal wounds that the body is struggling to deal with. This may have a huge impact on chronic wounds and also help ensure that acute wounds, such as from trauma or accidents, are optimised to heal from the start." 

The researchers tested the technology in increasingly realistic settings. In a rat bone-injury model, it helped form new blood vessels. In living human skin in the lab, the dressing improved how fast tissue grew into the material. In mouse skin wounds, treated wounds were much smaller after ten days. In all these cases, materials that could not be activated by cell pulling did not have the same effects. 

Towards more accessible wound care

 
The dressing works with the body’s own repair process and can collect healing proteins straight from a wound or blood, meaning it could help reduce the need for costly manufactured drugs and the cold storage needed to keep them stable. 

This could make advanced wound care more accessible in emergency medicine, humanitarian settings, frontline care, and low-resource health systems where severe wounds are common and advanced therapies are hardest to access. 

This research is being developed as an Imperial spinout opportunity. Traxion Biotech, led by Dr Magdalene Ho and Dr Ben Almquist, with Mr Hettiaratchy serving as a medical adviser, is in conversation with partners and healthcare professionals to bring this approach into clinical use. 

‘Force-responsive biomaterials drive tissue repair by harnessing endogenous growth factors’ was published in Nature Materials: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-026-02682-8