Immune cells in the healing skin wound: influential players at each stage of repair.

Immune cells are involved in virtually every aspect of the wound repair process, from the initial stages where they participate in hemostasis and work to prevent infection to later stages where they drive scar formation. Traditional views maintain that a strong immune response is advantageous for wound healing, but newer data have questioned the validity of this idea. As a result, opinions about how cells of the immune system contribute to the repair process have changed considerably over the past few years. Here, current studies investigating how different immune cell lineages function in the various stages of repair will be reviewed and their impact on the wound healing field will be discussed.