Dr Xanthe Strudwick, is a Research Fellow, Regenerative Medicine at the Uni SA, Future Industries Institute.

While a paper cut can be painful, real trouble starts with more serious wounds. Ideally, we would like to achieve true wound regeneration. Where the restored skin appears identical to and works as well as the original. Sadly, we don’t have treatments which enable this. Burn and diabetic patients are often left with debilitating scarring or with a wound that just fails to heal. The added risk of wound infection sadly compounds the problems faced by these patients.

Dr Strudwick is studying a protein which is present in high amounts in both burns and diabetic patients and seems responsible for their impaired healing. She works to understand how it prevents healing, in order to reduce its detrimental effects and promote healing. Dr Strudwick is also working with a multidisciplinary team to creating a new smart wound dressing that clears infections and jumpstarts the body’s own healing processes.

Dr Xanthe was awarded her PhD from UniSA in 2016 for her investigation of the role of the cytoskeletal protein Flightless I in tissue regeneration.

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