Challenges
The challenge: chronic inflammation that fails to heal
Chronic inflammatory disease is one of the major pressures facing healthcare systems globally. Across skin, lung, cardiovascular, metabolic and fibrotic disease, inflammation can move from a protective response into a persistent driver of tissue damage.
When this happens, patients often require long-term disease management rather than true tissue restoration.
Chronic inflammation creates a cycle of damage
Inflammation is essential for defence and repair. But when inflammatory signalling persists, tissues can become trapped in a cycle of injury, immune activation and failed recovery.
This dysregulated environment can prevent normal healing, impair tissue function and increase the need for repeated clinical intervention.
For many patients, the result is not a short episode of illness, but a long-term condition that affects mobility, independence, quality of life and healthcare use.
Current approaches often manage the consequences
Many existing treatments focus on controlling symptoms, suppressing inflammatory pathways or managing tissue damage after it has occurred.
These approaches are essential, but they do not always address the underlying failure to restore a healthy repair environment.
In chronic wounds, this often means repeated dressing changes, debridement, infection control, off-loading and ongoing monitoring. In other inflammatory diseases, patients may require long-term systemic therapies that can carry tolerability, safety or adherence challenges.
There remains a clear need for therapies that can intervene locally and help shift damaged tissue back towards repair.
Non-healing wounds show the scale of the problem
Chronic non-healing wounds are one of the clearest clinical examples of inflammation dysregulation. The wound remains inflamed, tissue repair stalls, and care can continue for months or years.
The burden is substantial. In 2017/18, the NHS managed an estimated 3.8 million patients with wounds, at an annual cost of £8.3 billion. Of this, £5.6 billion was linked to wounds that failed to heal.
This creates pressure across community nursing, primary care and specialist services, while patients face pain, infection risk, reduced mobility and loss of independence.
A broader unmet need
The same underlying challenge — chronic inflammation driving tissue damage and failed repair — is relevant beyond wounds.
Inflammatory skin disease, pulmonary inflammation, cardiovascular inflammation and fibrosis all involve persistent immune activation and progressive tissue dysfunction.
By starting in chronic non-healing wounds, EVolution Therapeutics is addressing a visible, measurable and high-burden clinical problem, while building towards a broader opportunity across inflammatory disease.
