Heat shock protein 70 (hsp 70) is an important member of the heat shock protein family, which is induced by different forms of stress. We attempted to find out if hsp 70 is also involved in wound healing, which likewise resembles a stress situation for cells too. Therefore we collected tissue samples from well healing and chronic human wound tissue. We used Northern- and Western-blot analysis to study the expression of hsp 70. At the protein level we found a strong correlation between well healing wounds and high expression of hsp 70, whereas chronic wounds showed no or weak expression. Interestingly hsp 70 mRNA did not show this significant correlation, displaying a variant expression pattern in the same kind of wound tissue, possibly due to unknown posttranscriptional regulating step, which has to be investigated in further studies. To localize hsp 70 mRNA and protein was used insitu hybridization and immunohistochemistry. Both displayed an overexpression in endothelial cells of capillary vessels.