Cellular Adhesion Impact on Epidermal Wound Healing

Alongside the random motion of cells, adhesive movement is essential for collective migration. Adhesion generates pushing and pulling force between moving cells. Although maintaining these collective dynamics of cells in repairing an epidermal wound is essential, the adhesivity of cells arising from the interaction between each other has been ignored in most mathematical studies modeling epidermal wounds. To understand the impact of cellular adhesion in the biological basis of epidermal wounds, in this paper, we start from the model proposed by Wearing and Sherratt (Math. Biosci. 165(1):41-62, 2000) investigating the activity of keratinocyte growth factor (KGF) on epidermal wound healing. We reduce their five-variable model to three, incorporating an advection term reflecting the cell-cell adhesion force. Based on numerical simulations of the healing progression, we compare the results of the proposed non-local model focussing on the activity of the advection term. This work further allows us to interpret the influence of adhesion on the re-epithelialization speed. We conclude that the adhesive bonds between basal cells have a significant effect when the amount of KGF in the wound area is suboptimal.