Molecular pathology of wound healing

Skin-wound healing is an orchestrated biological phenomena consisting of three sequential phases, inflammation, proliferation, and maturation. Many biological substances are involved in the process of wound repair, and this short and simplified overview of wound healing can be adopted to determine wound vitality or wound age in forensic medicine. With the development of genetically engineered animals, essential molecules for skin-wound healing have been identified. Especially, cytokines, and growth factors are useful candidates and markers for the determination of wound vitality or age. Moreover, bone marrow-derived progenitor cells would give significant information to wound age determination. In this review article, some interesting observations are presented, possibly contributing to the future practice of forensic pathologists.