Roles and applications of boron compounds in cutaneous acute and chronic wound healing

Acute wounds do not generally require professional treatment modalities and heal in a predictable fashion, but chronic wounds are mainly accompanied with infection and prolonged inflammation, leading to healing impairments and continuous tissue degradation. Therefore, life-threatening infections, extremity amputations or severely reduced health conditions due to these non-healing wounds are still the major challenges of the current technology. Although a vast amount of products have been being introduced to the market, claiming to provide a better optimization of local and systemic conditions of patients and an ideal wound healing environment, they do not meet the expectations due to being expensive and not easily accessible, requiring wound care facilities, having patient-specific response, low efficiency and severe side-effects. In this sense, developing new, safe, self-applicable, effective and cheap wound care products with broad-range antimicrobial activity is still an attractive area of international research. In the present work, boron derivatives (boric acid-BA and sodium pentaborate pentahydrate-NaB) were evaluated for their antimicrobial activity, proliferation, migratory, angiogenesis, gene and growth factor expression promoting effects on dermal cells in vitro. In addition, boron containing hydrogel formulation was examined for its wound healing promoting potential using full-thickness wound model in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats. The results revealed that while both boron compounds significantly increased proliferation, migration, vital growth factor and gene expression levels of dermal cells along with displaying remarkable antimicrobial effects against bacteria, yeast and fungi, NaB displayed greater antimicrobial properties as well as gene and growth factor expression inductive effects. Animal studies proved that NaB containing gel formulation enhanced wound healing rate of diabetic animals and histopathological scores. Overall data suggest a potential promising therapeutic option for the management of chronic wounds but further studies are highly warranted to determine signaling pathways and target metabolisms which boron is involved to elucidate the limitations and extend its use in clinics.