A new feature of the website will include monthly research posts that highlight the research of current tufts undergraduates/ graduate students. This is designed to build a greater understanding of what BME students on campus are working on and to see how they are getting active in the biomedical field. Check out the first post below!

Improved Wound Healing Through Electrical Stimulation

Yuki Ito (E16) and Watson Gifford (E15) are currently studying cutaneous wound healing on in vitro human skin equivalents (HSEs) to improve the overall wound healing process. They co-culture the HSEs with a silk scaffold soaked in fat with collagen, fibroblasts, and keratinocytes seeded on top of it. The three layers of the HSEs mimic the epidermal, dermal, and hypodermal layers of human skin in order to have as accurate a model of study as possible.
To induce a faster wound healing process with less scar tissue formation, they are developing an electrical stimulation (ES) device. This electrical stimulation device is a biocompatible device made of gold and parylene that applies a controlled electric field across wounds in order to enhance the cell’s natural bioelectrical signals. By adding an exogenous electric field to this otherwise slow process of wound healing, they plan to learn more about the process of wound healing in general. The long-term goal of their project is to allow people such as diabetics, chronic wound patients, and severe burn victims to heal their wounds that they could not otherwise heal themselves.