Leptin and fractalkine: Novel subcutaneous cytokines in burn injury.

Burn injury remains a major clinical challenge to both survival and to quality of life. Its progressive, aberrant inflammation underlies the lethal dysfunction of various organs and the pain it induces is excruciating and notoriously difficult to manage. While it is known that burn injury’s complex local and disseminating pathology is orchestrated from the burned tissue, few studies have sought to characterise the local signalling environment. An enhanced understanding of the local and acutely temporally-dynamic processes defining burn injury and its progression is required for the development of novel therapeutic interventions. Microdialysis was used as an interstitial sampling technique, conducted over three hours post-burn. Samples were analysed by metabolomics and a multiplex cytokine immunoassay. Next-Generation sequencing libraries of the burn and control microdialysis sites were prepared to measure transcriptional changes potentially underlying the interstitial profile characterising burn injury. All microdialysis sites in the study were excised for the extraction of RNA; 4 burn site and 4 control site samples were analysed.