A small peptide with potential ability to promote wound healing.

Wound-healing represents a major health burden, such as diabetes-induced skin ulcers and burning. Many works are being tried to find ideal clinical wound-healing biomaterials. Especially, small molecules with low cost and function to promote production of endogenous wound healing agents (i.e. transforming growth factor beta, TGF-β) are excellent candidates. In this study, a small peptide (tiger17, c[WCKPKPKPRCH-NH2]) containing only 11 amino acid residues was designed and proved to be a potent wound healer. It showed strong wound healing-promoting activity in a murine model of full thickness dermal wound. Tiger17 exerted significant effects on three stages of wound healing progresses including (1) the induction of macrophages recruitment to wound site at inflammatory reaction stage; (2) the promotion of the migration and proliferation both keratinocytes and fibroblasts, leading to reepithelialization and granulation tissue formation; and (3) tissue remodeling phase, by promoting the release of transforming TGF-β1 and interleukin 6 (IL-6) in murine macrophages and activating mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPK) signaling pathways. Considering its easy production, store and transfer and function to promote production of endogenous wound healing agents (TGF-β), tiger17 might be an exciting biomaterial or template for the development of novel wound-healing agents.