Study of the human chronic wound tissue: addressing logistic barriers and productive use of laser capture microdissection.

Direct procurement of tissue samples from clinically presented chronic human wounds is a powerful approach to understand mechanism at play in an actual problem wound. While such approach suffers from limitations related to lack of reproducible conditions across wounds, something that we are used to in the laboratory while studying wounds on experimental animals, the direct study of human wound tissue helps recognize the right questions to ask in the laboratory. Going back and forth between human wound and experimental animal studies helps steer studies on experimental wounds in a clinically relevant direction. In this chapter, we describe critical factors that need to be considered prior to planning a study involving human wound samples. In addition, we describe an approach to capture wound hyperproliferative epithelium (HE) from chronic human wound biopsies using laser capture microdissection (LCM). LCM is a new technology applicable to a broad range of clinical research and represents a catalyst of sophisticated translational research.