Effect of Chondroitin Sulfate on Tensile Strength of Healing Wounds

WITH the recent biochemical progress in the elucidation of the structure of collagen and the corresponding general interest in connective tissue, there has been a great deal of in vitro work which is of relevance to the process of wound healing. The promise of accelerating wound healing has always fascinated surgeons, and one might expect that recent biochemical progress would help in the attainment of this goal. During the course of wound healing experiments, however, one is constantly faced with the same problem—the general difficulty of relating in vitro connective tissue research to in vivo wound tensiometry experiments.

In a recent review of the biochemistry of wound healing, Chen and Postlethwait¹ have noted the problems in devising adequate controls for the in vitro work. From the point of view of scientific validity, there is no immediate promise of any medium more suitable for wound healing research than the experimental