Bioengineering Laboratory, Department of Chemical Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo, Amherst, New York, USA

Correspondence: Stelios T. Andreadis, Bioengineering Laboratory, 908 Furnas Hall, Department of Chemical Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo, Amherst, New York 14260, USA. Email: sandread@eng.buffalo.edu

Received 11 February 2003; Revised 4 April 2003; Accepted 6 May 2003; Published online 31 October 2003.

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that fibrin promotes epidermal regeneration in vitro and maintains the stem cell population after transplantation of keratinocytes in vivo. As epidermal keratinocytes do not express integrin v3, the receptor for fibrin and fibrinogen, the mechanism through which fibrin affects epidermal cells remains elusive. To investigate the role of fibrin in epidermal wound healing, we developed an in vitro model in which fibrin was added to the top of wounded keratinocyte monolayers grown on collagen. With this matrix topology, keratinocytes migrate between the collagen on their basal side and fibrin on their apical side mimicking migration of the epidermis in vivo. Using this model, we found that fibrin promoted keratinocyte migration in low and high calcium concentrations by exposing the cells to plasminogen. The migration rate depended strongly on the concentration of fibrinogen and the rate of plasmin-mediated fibrin degradation. Surprisingly, fibrin and fibrinogen caused significant detachment of keratinocytes which was prevented by the addition of calcium. Further examination using flow cytometry revealed that the detached cells were larger, more granular, and had very low levels of 1 integrin, which are all signs of differentiated keratinocytes. Our results suggest a novel dual role of fibrin in epidermal healing. First, fibrin promotes keratinocyte migration indirectly by exposing plasminogen to migrating cells, and second, fibrin selectively disrupts adhesion of differentiated keratinocytes. Our data are novel and may have important implications in understanding wound healing and in the use of fibrin as a biomaterial for protein and gene delivery.