Unveiling the wound healing potential of umbilical cord derived conditioned medium: an in vitro study

Abstract

Chronic wounds pose a serious threat to an individual’s health and quality of life. As such, therapeutic intervention is often needed to mitigate the improper closure of wounds. Large amounts of research and funding have been directed towards finding a suitable treatment. However, due to the severity and morbidity of such wounds, many pre-existing treatments are inefficient or costly. While the use of skin grafts and other such biological constructs in chronic wound healing has already been characterized, the use of umbilical cord tissue has only recently garnered interest, despite the cytokine-rich composition of Wharton’s jelly (cord component). Our current study aimed to characterize the use of an umbilical cord derived conditioned medium (UC-CM) to treat chronic wounds. We hypothesized that UC-CM contains higher amounts of wound healing cytokines, supporting cell proliferation, migration, and better wound healing properties compared to fetal bovine serum (FBS). Cytokine analysis demonstrated that UC-CM consistently contained desirable levels of HGF, EGF, VEGF, and TGF-β, all of which are vital to the normal wound healing process, whereas there were negligible amounts of growth factors in FBS except for TGF-β. MTT assay confirmed that UC-CM is not cytotoxic and promotes cell proliferation, while the scratch assay demonstrated that UC-CM supports migration of MSCs into the wound site. Taken altogether, our study showed that UC-CM was equally as effective as FBS-containing medium at promoting cell proliferation and wound healing.