They say you should wear your scars on your chest, never on your back but most people would just have their scars go away if possible. Scars are tough patches of fibrous tissue form as the body’s urgent repair job, sealing wounds quickly but imperfectly. While some scars might fade, they rarely go away completely.
Now, in a groundbreaking study from Australia, scientists may have found a way to nudge scarred skin back toward something more natural—and they’re doing it with a cream.
The Cream That Rewrote the Skin’s Script
More than half the people on Earth carry at least one scar, according to some estimates. For some, scars are subtle marks of survival. But for many, they are sources of discomfort, stiffness, or emotional distress, especially if they’re in some visible place like on the face. Treatments like lasers or surgery can help, but they’re costly, invasive, and far from perfect.
That’s what makes the new findings so compelling. Researchers at Fiona Stanley Hospital and the University of Western Australia have completed a Phase 1 clinical trial of a topical drug called PXS-6302, developed by Australian biotech company Syntara. This is not your typical moisturizer. The cream targets a group of enzymes called lysyl oxidases, which help knit collagen fibers together—a process crucial for normal skin but overactive in scar tissue.
“Skin scars remain a substantial clinical challenge because of their impact on appearance and psychological well-being,” the authors wrote in their paper, published in Science Translational Medicine.
The researchers tested the cream on 50 adult volunteers with mature scars—those fully healed and stable, at least a year old. The researchers designed the trial primarily to assess safety, but it revealed something much more intriguing: molecular signs that the scar tissue was beginning to remodel itself, shifting in texture and structure toward something resembling normal skin.
It really works
Researchers split the trial into two cohorts. In the first, eight participants applied the cream daily for three months. In the second, 42 more were randomly assigned either the cream or a placebo, applied three times a week for 90 days. All treated only a small 10 cm² patch of scar tissue.
At the end of the trial, participants in the treatment group showed a 66% reduction in lysyl oxidase activity—a biochemical fingerprint of the drug’s mechanism at work.
Inside the skin, the changes were significant. For one, collagen content dropped significantly. The scars showed reduced levels of hydroxyproline, a telltale marker of collagen, and lower overall protein density. These are signs that the scar’s dense and disorderly collagen matrix—the very thing that gives scars their rigidity and rough texture—was loosening up.
Even more striking, optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans revealed an increase in microvascular density in the treated scars, suggesting that new blood vessels were forming. This is key: healthy skin is laced with a dense web of tiny vessels, which help deliver oxygen and nutrients. Scar tissue, by contrast, is usually poorly vascularized.
Encouragingly, no serious adverse events occurred in the trial. Some participants experienced mild to moderate skin irritation like redness, or itching but symptoms resolved after stopping the cream.
This safety profile is especially promising when compared to more aggressive scar treatments, which can involve laser resurfacing, corticosteroid injections, or even surgical revision. Applying a topical cream just three times a week would mark a significant improvement over today’s standard scar treatments, which often require far more invasive approaches.
While the participants’ subjective ratings of scar appearance (using a tool called POSAS) did not show dramatic changes when compared to placebo, researchers emphasized that the trial was not designed to measure cosmetic improvement. Instead, its aim was to confirm whether the drug worked at the molecular level—and by that standard, it passed.
“To our knowledge, this study represents the first demonstration of a safe and effective pharmaceutical intervention that significantly improves the molecular composition of established scar extracellular matrix in humans,” the authors wrote.
What’s next?
This cream isn’t a publicly available product yet. However, the potential is clear.
Scars form when skin is forced to close wounds too quickly. Instead of rebuilding the tissue’s complex architecture, the body lays down collagen in a haphazard rush. That saves lives but it leaves its mark. If drugs like PXS-6302 continue to perform in larger trials, they could represent a paradigm shift in how we think about scarring: not as something inevitable, but as something modifiable, even after years.
The cream doesn’t work overnight, and the trial didn’t erase any scars. But it laid important groundwork for what comes next. A Phase 2 trial, likely with participants who have more severe hypertrophic or keloid scars, is on the horizon. Researchers hope it will test not only safety and biochemistry, but also visible outcomes and quality of life.
“The results strongly suggest lysyl oxidase inhibition is an effective mechanism by which to improve scars,” the authors concluded, “and warrants a Phase 2 efficacy study”.
