The Wound Reporting in Animal and Human Preclinical Studies (WRAHPS) Guidelines

Preclinical studies for wound healing disorders are an essential step in translating discoveries into therapies. Also, they are an integral component of initial safety screening and gaining mechanistic insights using an in vivo approach. Given the complexity of the wound healing process, existing guidelines for animal testing do not capture key information due to the inevitable variability in experimental design. Variations in study interpretation are increased by complexities associated with wound aetiology, wounding procedure, multiple treatment conditions, wound assessment, and analysis, as well as lack of acknowledgement of limitation of the model used. Yet, no standards exist to guide reporting crucial experimental information required to interpret results in translational studies of wound healing. Consistency in reporting allows transparency, comparative, and meta-analysis studies and avoids repetition and redundancy. Therefore, there is a critical and unmet need to standardise reporting for preclinical wound studies. To aid in reporting experimental conditions, The Wound Reporting in Animal and Human Preclinical Studies (WRAHPS) Guidelines have now been created by the authors working with the Wound Care Collaborative Community (WCCC) GAPS group to provide a checklist and reporting template for the most frequently used preclinical models in support of development for human clinical trials for wound healing disorders. It is anticipated that the WRAHPS Guidelines will standardise comprehensive methods for reporting in scientific manuscripts and the wound healing field overall. This article is not intended to address regulatory requirements but is intended to provide general guidelines on important scientific considerations for such studies.