CCF2017 emulgel: initial trial to development of a new drug aiming the skin wound treatment for clinical application in horses

Abstract

Skin wounds are discontinuities that may be cause by chemical, physical or biological agents, from which the body starts a mechanisms cascade to restore the skin integrity, such as coagulation, inflammation, granulation, angiogenesis, reepithelialization and extracellular matrix remodeling, which composes the healing process. The study of this process in skin wounds is very important in the veterinary medicine's field, especially in horses, whose excessive granulation implies delays in the other stages of healing, leading to the chronicity of the wounds and also may lead to the animal incapacitation or consequent death. Since these animals represents a huge economic investment, especially in Brazil, the development of new therapeutic strategies that accelerates the skin wound healing becomes especially important. For the treatment of skin wounds, the topical route appears as the best alternative, since it shows greater effectiveness with lower dose, lower systemic effects and less risk of adverse effects. However, the most commonly used formulations (creams, ointments and gels) have disadvantages such as risk of skin irritation and minor incorporation of the active principles. Thereby, emulgel appears as a formulation with improved incorporation of active principles and lower risk of skin irritation. In addition, because there are plenty difficulties related to experiments in equine models (appropriate infrastructure, high costs, etc.), we have decided to initially carry out the experiments with rats, in order to obtain an inference about potential drugs. Therefore, a CCF2017 Emulgel will be developed to evaluate the healing potential of skin wounds of a potential drug for clinical application in horses. Thus, male Wistar rats will be divided into the experimental groups (n = 6): sham, control without treatment, control treated with vehicle, CCF2017 0.015%, CCF2017 0.03% e CCF2017 0.06%. The animals will be submitted to a 3 cm diameter dorsal wound, which will be treated once a day during all experimental days and the wound areas will be measured for 3, 7 and 14 days to verify the macroscopic reduction, besides the analysis of clinical parameters. After submit the animals to euthanasia, the wound region will be designate to biochemical analysis to check the inflammatory and oxidative mechanisms. The results will be calculated by ANOVA method, followed by the Newman-Keuls test, with p <0.05. (AU)