While Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has often used skins of toads or other amphibians as a therapeutic, only preliminary work has been done to isolate why these materials actually exhibit an effect. Some previous studies conducted in China have identified potentially bioactive compounds within the skin of toads, but in terms of potential, Salamanders may prove more interesting. Salamanders are capable of regenerating entire limbs three to four times as quickly as other animals that exhibit the same behavior. Unfortunately, little is known about the underlying processes that allow such regeneration.

Recent studies have identified salamander skin as a viable target for investigating regenerative ability and developing novel skin repair treatments. In a recent investigation into the Red Knobby Newt, LAI Ren and his team at the Kunming Institute of Zoology (KIZ), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have recently identified a potent skin repair peptide known as Tylotin, which seems to function by directly enhancing the motility and proliferation of keratinocytes, vascular endothelial cells, and fibroblasts, thereby accelerating the typical healing process.

To see if administration of Tylotin to mammals would have the same effect as it does in Newts, LAI’s team topically applied a Tylotin compound to mice the same When testing this peptide on skin lesions in mice, LAI’s team noted that skin wounds on mice healed more rapidly when a Tylotin solution was topically administered. Despite some differences in the healing capability of mice and humans, the general process of wound repair is evolutionarily conserved, so LAI’s team suspects that future bioactive compounds derived from Tylotin may serve as a rough template for the generation of novel skin repair treatments.

The complete study, “A potential wound-healing-promoting peptide from salamander skin” was recently published in the FASEB Journal. 

(By Andrew Willden)