Two Queensland University of Technology research teams unlocking the secrets of hyperbaric-oxygen therapy have each received $10,000 grants from the Australasian Hyperbaric and Diving Medicine Research Trust to further their work.

Hyperbaric–oxygen therapy (HBO) is the administration of pure oxygen in a pressurised chamber that increases the amount of oxygen patients receive by between 10 and 15 times. It has been used to treat wounds, burns, gangrene, near drowning, severed limbs, smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning and near electrocution.

James Broadbent, from QUT’s School of Life Sciences, who is also a recipient of a Smart State PhD Scholarship, is conducting his research with the help of the Wesley Centre for Hyperbaric Medicine and the Cell and Molecular Proteomics Mass Spectrometry Facility at University of Queensland.

His research is concerned with studying types of proteins and their levels in fluids from wounds during the standard six-week course of HBO in order to be able to forecast the length of time chronic wounds would take to heal.

“Proteins regulate the healing process so if we can understand how they work to heal a wound during HBO we can personalise treatment because individual patients might need less or more or HBO combined with other therapy such as compression bandages or topical treatments,” Mr Broadbent said.

He said chronic leg ulcers commonly occurred with diabetes and heart problems. “We still don’t know if the two types of ulcers respond in different ways.”

Rebecca Dawson is working in the Tissue Repair and Regeneration Program at QUT’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI) which has developed a human skin equivalent to study wound healing.

Rebecca’s team will use the grant to further research into isolating and ‘growing’ more of the cellular components of skin to improve our understanding of the dynamics of healing in skin and the mechanisms of how HBO therapy affects skin repair.

“At IHBI we have isolated the individual components of the upper two layers of the skin – the epidermis and the dermis – grown them individually, and then put them back together to make a model of the skin,” Ms Dawson said.

“We want to make the model more realistic by adding more components of skin so that we can study how the cells all cross-communicate and we can then create a superficial wound and then observe how HBO works to heal it.”

Ms Dawson said her study would look at such factors as how much exposure to HBO skin needed to heal and the optimal stage of the healing process in which to introduce HBO.