Paradigm of Scarless Wound Healing

Whereas adult cutaneous wounds heal with scar formation to restore tissue integrity, perfect and rapid skin repair occurs in utero after wounding [1-3].

Initially, the capacity for scarless repair was attributed to the obvious environmental differences in which fetal and adult wounds heal. Early studies eliminated, however, fetal environment (i.e., amniotic fluid, which is sterile and rich in hyaluronic acid) as reason for the scarless healing phenotype and demonstrated that scarless repair is intrinsic to fetal skin tissue [4].