Burn wounds are highly debilitating injuries, with significant morbidity and mortality rates worldwide. In association with the damage of the skin integrity, the risk of infection is increased, posing an obstacle to healing and potentially leading to sepsis. Another limitation against healing is associated with antibiotic resistance mainly due to the use of systemic antibiotics for the treatment of localized infections. Nanotechnology has been successful in finding strategies to incorporate antibiotics in nanoparticles for the treatment of local wounds, thereby avoiding the systemic exposure to the drug. This review focuses on the most recent advances on the use of nanoparticles in wound dressing formulations and in tissue engineering for the treatment of burn wound infections.

Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells (hMSCs) play an important role as new therapeutic alternatives in advanced therapies and regenerative medicine thanks to their regenerative and immunomodulatory properties, and ability to migrate to the exact area of injury. These properties have made hMSCs one of the more promising cellular active substances at present, particularly in terms of the development of new and innovative hMSC-based products. Currently, numerous clinical trials are being conducted to evaluate the therapeutic activity of hMSC-based products on specific targets. Given the rapidly growing number of hMSC clinical trials in recent years and the complexity of these products due to their cellular component characteristics and medicinal product status, there is a greater need to define more stringent, specific, and harmonized requirements to characterize the quality of the hMSCs and enhance the analysis of their safety and efficacy in final products to be administered to patients. These requirements should be implemented throughout the manufacturing process to guarantee the function and integrity of hMSCs and to ensure that the hMSC-based final product consistently meets its specifications across batches. This paper describes the principal phases involved in the design of the manufacturing process and updates the specific technical requirements needed to address the appropriate clinical use of hMSC-based products. The challenges and limitations to evaluating the safety, efficacy, and quality of hMSCs have been also reviewed and discussed.

Purpose: Radiologic accidents or terrorist acts involving radioactive material, as well as radiation exposure in medical or industrial procedures are potential sources of risk for human health. All these risks share a common element, exposure to ionizing radiation. The extent of ionizing radiation injury will depend on a number of independent variables such as dose, type of radiation and tissue, etc. As a result of ionizing radiation exposure, biological effects can take place in acute or long term manner. As in the case of other self-renewing tissues (eg. hematopoietic system and intestinal epithelium), skin is also extremely sensitive to ionizing radiation. In this way, appropriate management of radiation skin effects might improve the therapeutic benefit of medical radiation therapy, as well as reduce the mortality associated with any radiological incident (eg. accident or terrorist attack). For this reason, current and potential future treatment approaches for skin radiation injury are reviewed in this work. Conclusions: Unfortunately, there is not sufficient evidence for establishing a standard treatment to prevent or mitigate radiation-induced cutaneous injury. Thus, continued research is necessary to achieve effective therapies to address this important health problem.