Plasma and Carbon Monoxide, good Allies for Medical Applications – MediCO-Plasma

Wound healing is a major public health problem, and in France, 3% of the population suffers from chronic wounds that take from months to years to be cured and represent a handicap in everyday life. Most chronic wound patients either suffer diseases such as diabetes and obesity, or are of advanced age. In Western Europe the number of chronic wound patients grows every year due to population aging and the increase in diabetes and obesity. Usually, a wound becomes chronic due to chronic inflammation. When the level of inflammatory mediators is too high, an imbalance between various biological factors occurs, resulting in damage in the growth of the new tissue and remodeling stages. Wound healing then slows down and the wound is more exposed to bacteria, which can lead to infection, increasing the inflammatory response and amplifying the imbalance between biological factors, which reinforces the chronic inflammation. A critical point to solve, therefore, is to reduce the inflammation, and to find new strategies to do so. Carbon monoxide (CO) plays a key role in wound healing as it is anti-inflammatory. However, delivering CO in safe conditions for wound healing is complicated.
In MediCO-Plasma, I propose the upstream strategy of developing a new device for the prevention of chronic wounds in order to prevent chronic inflammation and all the problems connected with it. The originality lies in the use of plasma, an ionized gas, to produce CO locally. Non equilibrium plasma has the ability to generate large population densities of reactive species combined with an electric field, radiation and charged particles, while keeping the overall gas temperature near room temperature, allowing the plasma to be in direct contact with living tissues while ensuring no risk of burning. This kind of plasma has the ability to significantly decrease bacterial load for a large variety of bacteria including ultra-resistant strains and may repair the wound faster. The ambition of MediCO-Plasma is to use such a plasma to produce CO from CO2 to combine the beneficial effects of plasma and CO. The plasma treatment will be involved in all steps of the wound healing process, combining several protocols in one tool: the plasma will perform decontamination, CO will regulate inflammation, while both CO and plasma will contribute to forming new blood vessels and enhancing nutrient and oxygen supplies.
To tackle this challenge, I propose a 4-year multidisciplinary project divided into 4 work packages:
WP1 | The goal will be to build the most promising plasma reactor as CO source for chronic wound prevention, and to ensure that it is safe for medical use.
WP2 | It will deal with the study of plasma chemistry in gas phase in order to gain more insight into the CO production processes.
WP3 | Another way to use plasma is to treat a liquid with the plasma to chemically activate it and to use it on a wound. WP3 will deal with this configuration. The aim of this WP will be to provide a good assessment of the main species produced in the liquid in order to determine the main chemical reactions occurring in plasma to produce CO.
WP4 | The goal will be to determine the role of CO produced by plasma on wound healing by studying the plasma treatment in vitro on skin cells and in vivo on wounded mice.
The outcome of MediCO-Plasma will be to develop a portable, efficient and cheaper prototype for chronic wound prevention. The device will be easily transportable, and nurses or physicians will be able to use it for home-based treatment. Such a device will improve the quality of life of people prone to chronic wounds, and will decrease the number of drugs that such patients need to take. Additionally, the device could also be used for healing other kinds of wounds such as burns and bites.