Post Stress Treatment

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The primary goal in treating burns is to preserve as much tissue as possible. This promotes the healing process and improves the quality of life for patients after recovery. In order to survive, the cells in the damaged tissue must activate the heat shock response, one of the most important emergency mechanisms. However, our results show that this signalling pathway is activated with a significant delay after burns. In this project, we are therefore developing a new treatment method for burns, called post-stress treatment (PST).

Department

Applied Life Sciences

High heat has devastating effects on living cells. In the case of burn injuries, lysis occurs immediately in the regions with the highest temperatures. Cells in the underlying layer may survive, but are severely impaired by the heat. In addition, the surrounding tissue is severely altered by reduced blood flow and oedema formation. Together with infections, these conditions can dramatically worsen the survival of the cells and ultimately lead to complete necrosis in this tissue zone. This phenomenon is known as burn wound progression and is a significant complication of treatment. In addition, patients with deep burn wounds also suffer a significant deterioration in their quality of life in the long term.

When looking at the damage at the cellular level, it is noticeable that heat exposure causes denatured proteins. These block the cellular signalling and synthesis pathways and therefore represent a high burden. If the proteins are not eliminated, they dramatically reduce the survival rate of the cells, especially during the subsequent conditions of burn wound progression. The removal of denatured proteins occurs through the heat shock response.

We investigated this cellular signalling pathway and found that it is activated only slowly after short heat exposure. As a hypothesis, we have therefore developed a special treatment that we call "Post Stress Treatment" (PST). The idea of this method is to activate the delayed heat shock response through a low-stress post-burn treatment. Although this PST significantly increased the overall stress for the cells in the preliminary experiments, we were still able to show a clear improvement in the survival of fish embryos after short heat exposure. In this project we investigate the regulation of the heat shock signalling pathway after burns. These experiments will be performed in cell culture cells and in fish embryos, as these are particularly suitable for a genetic analysis of the signalling pathway. As a result, we will obtain important markers of the signalling pathway for subsequent experiments. The main aim of the project is to optimise the PST for the treatment of burns.

Research Goals

Activation of the Heat Shock Response
Development of the “Post-Stress Treatment”

Methodology

Investigation of the regulation of the heat shock signaling pathway
Development and evaluation of the “Post-Stress Treatment” (PST) method
Conducting experimental analyses in cell cultures and fish embryos
Optimizing the PST as a potential treatment strategy for burn injuries

The body's own rescue operation for burns

When the body is exposed to extreme heat, the cells start an emergency programmeViennese biotechnologists want to artificially trigger this mechanism with drugs. (derStandard)

Go to the article in derStandard.at