Wounds and wound healing: new insights, fresh challenges

The scholarly review in this issue of the BJD provides a summary of the current state of knowledge and understanding of wounds and wound healing. In the recent past, chronic wounds may have been an irritation and inconvenience for some dermatologists. Even now, it is hard to reconcile the scale of the clinical challenge faced by society concerning wounds and wound healing with the limited and patchy academic and clinical interest in this field. The purpose of this scholarly review is to explore wound healing through four state‐of‐the‐art reviews. To set the scene, Martin and Nunan1 provide a concise and readable account of the biology of wound healing. As with other biological systems in the skin, this is complex and involves a number of interacting and overlapping cellular and molecular processes. In view of the complexity it is not surprising that it can be perturbed. Martin and Nunan explain that better understanding of the cellular and molecular processes involved in healing through the development of new and improved laboratory models of human chronic wounds has created a platform for the development of more effective therapies.