Non-healing diabetic wounds are difficult to treat. They also create heavy 
financial burdens for both patients and society. Negative pressure wound therapy 
(NPWT) has been adopted to treat intractable wounds and has proved to be 
effective. However, the mechanisms that underlie the effects of this treatment 
are not entirely understood. Circulating fibrocytes are unique 
haematopoietic-derived stem cells that have been reported to play a pivotal role 
in wound healing. Here, we have investigated the effect of NPWT on fibrocyte 
mobilization and the role of fibrocyte mobilization in the healing of diabetic 
wounds during NPWT. We show that the NPWT group exhibited 2.6-fold to 12.1-fold 
greater numbers of tail vein-injected PKH-26-labelled fibrocytes in the diabetic 
wound sites compared with the control group. We also demonstrate that the 
full-thickness skin wounds treated with NPWT exhibit significantly reduced mRNA 
and protein expression, blood vessel density and proliferating cells when 
exogenous fibrocyte mobilization is inhibited. We speculate that systemic 
mobilization of fibrocytes during NPWT may be a mechanism for healing 
intractable wounds in a diabetic rat model experiment and that enhancement of 
cell mobilization may represent a potential treatment idea for intractable wound 
healing across all fields of surgery.