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Hello.
My name is Gregory Schultz, and
I'm a Professor of Obstetrics
and Gynecology, and Director
of the Institute for Wound
Research at the
University of Florida.
This presentation will focus on
the important topic of biofilms
and chronic wounds, and especially
how to win the war in wounds.
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As an overview of topics, we're
going to briefly review the four
sequential phases of
normal wound healing,
because we want to specifically
recognize the beneficial effects
of controlled inflammation
and protease activities.
Because we want to understand
there is a very strong link
between chronic inflammation that is
caused by both planktonic or single
bacteria, as well as bacteria when
they're in this biofilm community
that we're going to talk about.
Because these bacteria are
extremely inflammatory,
and they cause elevated
levels of protease activities
that destroy proteins that
are essential for healing,
such as the extracellular
matrix proteins,
growth factors, and their receptors.
A key point about understanding the
difference between bacteria growing
as single planktonic
and biofilm communities
is that biofilm bacteria are
highly tolerant to most antibiotics,
antiseptics and
disinfectants that are
able to kill planktonic
bacteria very rapidly.
In addition, we want to try to
integrate these ideas and concepts
about the molecular biology
of bacteria in biofilms
into the integrated concept
of biofilm based wound care.
And the good news is
that this is really
just a slight different emphasis
in the concept of wound bed
preparation-- or the TIME
acronym-- because it emphasizes
the critical importance
of debriding biofilms,
and then especially
preventing the bacteria
in planktonic form from
reforming the biofilm rapidly.