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January 16, 2005

Breakthrough In Spinal And Brain Injury Research

A major breakthrough appears to have occurred in the search for a treatment of brain and spinal injuries. Scientists have for the first time successfully grown brain cells in the laboratory and used the cells to successfully treat at least one individual:

The breakthrough brings new hope in the search for therapies not only for accident victims but also for those suffering the effects of strokes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other degenerative conditions.

The scientists emphasise the research is experimental, but it suggests there may one day be hope for spinal injury victims such as the late Christopher Reeve, the Superman star paralysed in a riding accident who died last year.

In the initial experiments, a man given the cultured brain cells apparently regained the ability to walk.

The research was carried out in China by Professor Zhu Jianhong, of Fudan University Hospital, who will announce the results of his work in London later this month.

"This is a world-first," said Professor Stephen Minger, director of the stem cell biology laboratory at the Wolfson Centre for age-related diseases at King's College London.

"If the initial results prove accurate, this has huge implications for new treatments."

Scientists have long recognised that if they can find a way to grow neurones, the cells that comprise the functional parts of the brain and spine, they will be able to treat a wide range of currently incurable conditions. That is because in adult humans such cells have almost no ability to divide, grow and replace themselves as they die off through disease, injury or old age.

After the age of 25, a typical adult loses millions of neurones a week, a process that can be accelerated in later years by diseases such as Alzheimer's. Scientists have always wondered if they could find a way to kick-start neurones so that they regain the ability to divide, grow and repair themselves.

The discovery of stem cells in the 1990s prompted new hope. Stem cells are primitive cells that have the potential to divide and grow into almost any kind of specialised cell. In adults there are different stem cells for most types of tissue, including the brain.

But all previous attempts to use these to grow brain cells have failed. This is partly because of the difficulty of obtaining fresh brain cells to work on, meaning many groups have had to use samples from dead bodies.

Professor Zhu is understood to have obtained his brain samples from the accident and emergency department of the hospital where he works.

One day he treated a patient who had been stabbed in the eye with a chopstick. When the stick was removed it was covered in brain material, which he was able to grow in a culture medium.

If this research is validated, as described in this article, it will indeed be a revolutionary step in the treatment of many neurologic diseases and injuries.

Posted at 11:14 PM Pacific