Margit Kempf
  1. Current research activities

    2. Royal Children’s Hospital Burns Research Group.
    The group is lead by Dr Roy Kimble (burns surgeon) and consists of Dr John Fraser (research fellow), Dr Mark Hayes (lab manager), Ms Leila Cuttle (research assistant), Ms Margit Kempf (research assistant) and many clinical personnel. The lab is situated next to the Burns unit of the Royal Children’s Hospital and therefore the clinical and laboratory aspects of our research are well integrated.

    We are interested in scarless wound healing and specifically wound healing after burn injury. We have developed a model of deep dermal burn injury in the sheep and shown that the sheep fetus heals this injury without scarring while the post-natal lamb heals the injury with scarring. We are now using genomic analysis (arrays) and proteomic analysis (2D gels) to determine the factors in fetal skin that may predispose it to heal without scar.

    We have done some investigation using amniotic membrane as a potential therapy to heal burn wounds and found that it has a limited anti-scaring effect. Further study is ongoing.

    We are also developing a porcine burn model. We recognise that porcine skin is closer to human skin both anatomically and physiologically, and a pig model would be a good model for the trial of new therapeutics. After development of this model, new agents could be tested on our burn wound model to determine healing efficacy

  2. Keywords

    3. Burns, healing, scar, prevention

  3. End-user applications

    •  Scarless wound healing
    • An animal burn model which potential therapies could be tested on

  4. Key publications

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  5. Outreach activities

    6. None as Yet.

  6. Key organisation membership

    7. None as Yet.

  7. Early career researcher?

    8. No.

  8. Young investigator?

    9. No.

  9. Skills and expertise

    • Development of sheep burn model
    • Animal surgical expertise
    • Storage and use of amniotic membrane
    • Semi-quantitative immunohistochemistry analysis
    • 2D gel analysis
  10. Specialist equipment and infrastructure

    • Laser Dopler Machine – used to measure the depth of burn wounds
    • Well developed equipment and facilities at the Herston Medical Research Centre – to store animals and conduct animal surgeries
    • Microscope with cooled camera – for digital capture of sections and semi-quantitative analysis with ImagePro Plus
    • Access to current burn therapies and dressings
    • Access to burn patients
  11. Contact Details 


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