Elastase chronic wounds

Schoenfelder U, Abel M, Wiegand C, Klemm D, Eisner P, Hipler U-C (2005) Biomaterials 26 6664 Influence of selected wound dressings on PMN elastase in chronic wound fluid and their antioxidative potential in vitro... 

Neutrophils also contain several cationic serine proteases (5). The enzyme, elastase, is particularly abundant The amount of elastase contained in the granules of a single neutrophil is in excess of one picogram (4) Several groups have used specific inhibitors as well as antisera to demonstrate that elastase or an elastase-like protease is abundant in chronic wound fluids (13,22-24). Mean levels of elastase activity is approximately 12-fold higher in fluids of chronic dermal ulcers compared to surgical... 

Figure 3. Neutrophil elastase in chronic wound fluids is capable of degrading peptide growth factors. FTransforming growth factor- j was incubated alone (lane 1), with purified neutrophil elastase (lanes 2 and 3), and with 100 xg of chronic wound fluid (lanes 4 and 5) at 3TC for 90 minutes. The presence of intact growth factor was assessed by gel electrophoresis and autoradiography. A specific inhibitor of neutrophil elastase (10 xM N-methoxysuccinyl-ala-ala-pro-val-chloromethyl ketone) was included in lanes 3 and 5.

Another abundant plasma protease inhibitor, ai-antiprotease (apantitrypsin), irreversibly inhibits neutrophil elastase by forming an enzyme-inhibitor complex (38). Levels of complexed forms of ai-antiprotease are significantly increased in chronic wound fluids and at least some of these complexes contain elastase (13,22). 

Figure 1 Discovery process for cotton-based dressing containing fiber-protease inhibitors for application to chronic wounds where proteases such as elastase and metalloproteases are elevated.

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