Word: wounded
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While there are few truly new analgesics on the market, pain specialists have been ingenious about expanding the use of existing drugs. Surgeons, for instance, have learned that by putting a local anesthetic directly into the wound during and immediately after an operation, they prevent acute pain from getting established. "You never let the spinal cord see the pain messages," explains Berde. "It mollifies the entire course of postoperative pain...
...including heart disease, transplant rejection, stroke, arthritis, shock and cancer. Michael Gimbrone Jr., head of vascular research at Harvard Medical School, predicts "a whole new generation of therapeutic interventions." Several drugs are now being tried on humans, and early next year the first of them -- a gel that spurs wound healing -- will enter the final U.S. government approval process...
...opposite end of the spectrum are inflammatory diseases like arthritis and multiple sclerosis, in which things have got a bit too sticky. Normally, inflammation is part of the healing process. At a wound site, for example, chemical signals prompt the cells of nearby blood vessels to produce more CAMs, turning the vessels into a kind of biological flypaper that attracts platelets, leukocytes and other repair cells to the scene of destruction. Once healing is under way, the signals subside so the vessels lose their stickiness and inflammation recedes. But in a disease like arthritis, the chemical signal is always present...
Still, too much inflammation is probably better than none at all. The latter is the peculiar plight of Brooke Blanton, a 13-year-old Dallas girl who has taught researchers much of what they know about cell adhesion and wound healing. Brooke first came to doctors' attention as an infant, when her umbilicus and teething sores failed to close and became infected. Strangely, Brooke's lesions contained no pus -- the carcasses of millions of white cells that pile up at infection sites -- even though her bloodstream was teeming with infection-fighting white cells, or leukocytes...
Furthest along of the new adhesion drugs is an "artificial matrix" designed to promote wound healing. Normally, a wound site looks like the Grand Canyon to arriving rescue cells. But this biodegradable gel, produced by Telios Pharmaceuticals, is peppered with synthesized CAM molecules so that cells arriving at a wound site will have plenty of places to get a grip. With the new gel filling in the gap, repairing wounds, including severe burns or skin ulcers, takes 30% less time and leaves less of a scar, claims company scientific director Michael Pierschbacher...