Wound healing in the 21st century

Delayed wound healing is one of the major therapeutic and economic issues in medicine today. Cutaneous wound healing is an extremely well-regulated and complex process basically divided into 3 phases: inflammation, proliferation, and tissue remodeling. Unfortunately, we still do not understand this process precisely enough to give direction effectively to impaired healing processes. There have been many new developments in wound healing that provide fascinating insights and may improve our ability to manage clinical problems. Our goal is to acquaint the reader with selected major novel findings about cutaneous wound healing that have been published since the beginning of the new millennium. We discuss advances in areas such as genetics, proteases, cytokines, chemokines, and regulatory peptides, as well as therapeutic strategies, all set in the framework of the different phases of wound healing. (J Am Acad Dermatol 2010;63:866-81.)