THE EFFECTS OF MACROPHAGES ON THE SURVIVAL OF RANDOM SKIN FLAPS IN SWINE

Tissue macrophages play a critical role in neovascularization by relea sing angiogenic cytokines, Macrophages normally arrive into a wound be d 48 to 96 hours following an injury(1). Introducing macrophages into a wound bed at the time of closure would theoretically stimulate neova scularization in the traumatized tissue prior to what is normally obse rved, The ability to promote early angiogenesis could be an important factor in the survival of an extended skin flap.By taking advantage of advanced cell-sorting techniques, the authors developed the first stu dy to evaluate the effect of placing a purified autologous macrophage population into an extended skin flap. We created 72 dorsally based ra ndom skin flaps in Yorkshire pigs; 48 of these wounds received autolog ous macrophages while 24 naps served as controls. The macrophages were obtained by utilizing monoclonal antibodies in conjunction with flow cytometry. The skin naps were evaluated on postoperative day 6 for the ir viability. Analysis of the data showed no statistically significant difference between the control and treatment flaps. There was, howeve r, a trend of increased survival for naps treated with macrophages. Th is is the first study to investigate using a purified population of ce lls 60 improve the survival of random skin flaps.