Biomedical Dermatology

Ganoderma lucidum, a double-walled basidiospore produced by porous basidiomycete fungi, has been used as a traditional medicine for thousands of years. It is considered a valuable Chinese medicine for strengthening body resistance, invigorating the spleen, and replenishing Qi. G. lucidum contains a variety of active ingredients, such as polysaccharides, triterpenoids, nucleosides, sterols, alkaloids, polypeptides, fatty acids, steroids, and inorganic elements, and has anticancer, anti-inflammatory, hepatoprotection, hypoglycemic, anti-melanogenesis, anti-aging, and skin barrier-repairing activity.

The review summarizes the traditional usages, distribution, active constituents, structure, and biological effects of G. lucidum, with an aim to offer directions for further research and better usage of G. lucidum as a medicinal raw material.

With the steadily increasing trend of functional cosmetics consumption, the public is increasingly expecting the efficacy of cosmetics, and in order to meet these consumer needs, the development of various effective raw materials, as well as products through technical convergence research, has been activating focusing on dermatology. In the Republic of Korea, much attention was paid to cosmetic raw materials using human stem cells as a new growth engine at the end of the 2000s. Accordingly, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety implemented the Regulations on Cosmetic Safety Standards, etc., which contains the safety standards of human-derived cell and tissue culture as raw materials for cosmetics.

Twice a day, morning and evening, for 28 days, 3 mL of the sample provided for each subject was applied onto the entire face using an airbrush. The subjects were divided into a control group (C), an experimental group 1 (ADSC-CM 5% group, E1) and an experimental group 2 (polymersome-containing of ADSC-CM 5% group, E2), and there were 20 subjects in each group.

Moisture content on the U-zone, melanin and erythema of lid-cheek, overall size and depth of eye wrinkles, and skin roughness of the items showed significant differences among all three groups. More specifically, E1 had a higher rate of skin improvement than C, and E2 had the highest skin improvement rate in all items: skin moisture content, transepidermal water loss (TEWL), melanin and erythema of lid-cheek, eye wrinkles, and skin roughness of lid-cheek.

The effectiveness of ADSC-CM was verified in all items: increases in moisture content, decrease in TEWL, and improvements of whitening and wrinkles. Moreover, the effectiveness of ADSC-CM was observed as higher in samples of polymersome-containing ADSC-CM than those of raw material ADSC-CM. Furthermore, percutaneous absorption was improved compared with previous studies on formulations in relation to polymersome at the same concentration of ADSC-CM, thereby resulting in higher effectiveness.

Korea National Institute for Bioethics Policy, P01–201809–13-001, Registered 06 September 2018, http://public.irb.or.kr/.

Burns are injuries that lie on the skin or other organic tissues caused by exposures to the heat, electricity, chemicals or ionizing radiation. The present study was carried out to record temporal changes in the cell population and wound healing-related gene expression in rats with deep partial-thickness burn.

Burn wound was induced on the dorsal part of Sprague-Dawley rats using temperature-regulated 20-mm wide aluminum head heating device. Animals were then sacrificed on days three, seven, 11, 14 and 21 post-burn, respectively. Half of the wounded skin tissues were dissected and fixed in buffered neutral formalin for Hematoxylin & Eosin (H&E) staining, and the other half were cut off and stored in − 20 °C for real-time PCR analyses.

The number of adipose cells was found to be maximal on the 3rd day post-burn, and it gradually decreased over time and completely disappeared on day 11 post-burn. The maximum number of neutrophils were found to be on the 3rd and 14th day post-burn, while the maximum number of myofibroblasts were found on the 11th day post-burn. The number of lymphocytes did not change too much during the whole healing process. At the gene expression level, the expression pattern of inflammation-related genes including IL-6, TNF-α and iNOS were similar, which was found to be increased from day 3 to day 11 and decreased thereafter. Angiogenesis related genes including both VEGF-A and TGF-β1 showed a same expression pattern, both of which were slightly increased from day 3 to day 14 and smoothly decreased on day 21 post-burn. Matrix re-modeling related genes including MMP-2, TIMP-2 and Collagen-1 changed over time synchronously, where they all persistently increased from day 3 till day 14, then slightly declined on day 21 post-burn.

The present study revealed the changes in the cell population and expression profile of wound healing-related genes in deep partial-thickness burn, which could provide a cellular and genomic basis for the future research of burn injuries.