Basic and acidic fibroblast growth factors (FGF) are two primary mitogens for capillary endothelial cells. Bovine basic FGF, isolated from pituitaries, will be used in rat wound healing models to determine whether this factor can accelerate the rate of wound healing through promoting angiogenesis. This is the first step towards developing a therapy that will be used in the treatment of burn and other trauma victims who have poorly healing wounds. To obtain a source of the human FGF's, for further animal tests and for eventual clinical trials, the DNA sequences encoding both basic and acidic FGF will be cloned. This will allow the future development of recombinant DNA expression systems for the human proteins.
