Researchers at Drexel University College of Medicine and the University of Texas at Austin were able to treat rats that have spinal cord injury with neurons grown in a petri dish. The animals, whose breathing abilities were severely stifled by the injury, showed improvement in their breathing following the therapy. This is an impressive result and foreshadows repair of spinal nerve injuries in humans that leave so many people severely disabled.
The lab-grown cells, called V2a interneurons, can be grown from the patient’s own stem cells and injected into the site of injury. These types of cells seem to be responsible for communication between sensory and motor neurons and the specific V2a variety has shown an impressive ability to settle into a new environment and begin its normal function.
“By understanding the body’s own attempt at repair, we hope to amplify that process therapeutically with cell transplantation and rehabilitation,” said Lyandysha Zholudeva, the study’s lead author. “Now we’ve identified one of the cell types that contributes to the formation of new pathways that lead to plasticity.”
Study in Journal of Neurotrauma: Transplantation of Neural Progenitors and V2a Interneurons after Spinal Cord Injury…
Via: Drexel University…