Impact of anomalous transport kinetics on the progress of wound healing

•A new wound contraction model is formulated to include fractional viscoelasticity and anomalous transport kinetics of cellular and chemical species.•Differences in the myofibroblasts densities are observed due to the considered fractional kinetics.•Fractional viscoelasticity favors the over-expression of collagen within the wound.

This work focuses on the transport kinetics of chemical and cellular species during wound healing. Anomalous transport kinetics, coupling sub- and superdiffusion with chemotaxis, and fractional viscoelasticity of soft tissues are analyzed from a modeling point of view. The paper presents a generalization of well stablished mechano-chemical models of wound contraction (Murphy et al., 2012; Valero et al., 2014) to include the previously mentioned anomalous effects by means of partial differential equations of fractional order. Results show the effect that anomalous dynamics have on the contraction rate and extension and on the distribution of biological species, and indicators of fibroproliferative disorders are identified.