Prospective Role of Simvastatin on Wound Healing: Review of the Literature

Abstract

Background: Wound healing is a normal biological complex and dynamic process of substituting injured and misplaced cellular structures and tissue layers. This complicated development is achieved through four different phases: haemostasis, inflammation, proliferation, and finally remodelling. These four phases must occur in the proper sequence and time frame to achieve successful wound healing. Over years topical antibiotics were applied on wounds but it causes side effects and resistance; that’s why it was a necessity to find a new topical wound healing drugs rather than antibiotics.Methods: Literature was searched in NCBI (The National Center for Biotechnology Information Advances Science and Health), Wiley online library, ScienceDirect database using the keywords Simvastatin, wound healing, Topical formulation. Articles that seemed suitable based on title and abstract were included. Also, a personal collection of literature on the subject pleiotropic effects of simvastatin, hydrogels, and polymeric nanoparticles was referred.Results: Beside cholesterol-lowering effect of Simvastatin (SIM), it has many unusual therapeutic modalities for different pathological disorders such as healing bone tissue, cancer cell inhibition, many inflammatory diseases and wound healing. SIM wound healing induction arises from its angiogenesis activity and antibacterial activity. It can interfere with bacterial protein synthesis and inhibits both multiple biosynthetic pathways and cellular processes in bacteria without the conventional antibiotics side effects or fear of bacterial resistance.Conclusion: This review discusses the wound types and wound healing process, the nanosizing advantage in wound healing, gels and hydrogel characters and the approved application of simvastatin topically to wound healing via promotion of epithelialization and antibacterial activity.