Will the wound-healing field earn its wings?

Abstract

In a recently published issue of Experimental Dermatology, Dr. Nuria Paricio and colleagues review recent advances using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a wound-healing model. They describe many of the advantages of the fly model for gene discovery and functional analysis, highlighting its particular strengths and limitations for studies of wound healing. This commentary assumes that dermatologist-scientists and fly wound-healing researchers share a common field-wide goal of discovering all of the clinically relevant wound-healing genes and understanding in molecular detail how those genes work. We ask: how can we cooperate to achieve this shared goal?