New technique induces growth
across spinal cord injury
Animal study may change understanding of barriers to regeneration May 24, 1999 Neuron is the first to report repairing such an injury without the use of implanted cells or tissues to bridge the severed fibers. In addition, the findings call into question current assumptions about barriers to spinal cord regeneration. "We have actually tricked nerve cells into growing beyond the area of a spinal cord injury by switching them into an actively growing state," says Clifford Woolf, MD, PhD, of the Neural Plasticity Research Group in the MGH Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care, who led the study. "While the particular approach we used cannot be applied in humans, it points us in a promising new direction. The question is no longer whether spinal cord regeneration is possible but how it will be achieved." Because two branches of the same cell exhibit totally different healing capacities, most researchers thought the difference must lie in the environments surrounding the branches, which are very different. Previous attempts to repair severed spinal cords focused on implants of peripheral nerve-tissue "bridges," reproducing cellular environments similar to that of peripheral nerves, or grafts made from embryonic spinal cords, which have the capacity to regenerate. The success of those efforts, Woolf says, has been marginal. In the current study, Woolf and his colleague Simona Neumann, PhD, questioned the assumption that environment made the key difference. "Perhaps, we thought, the question should be whether or not the cell was receiving molecular signals from the injury site to stimulate regeneration. Maybe damage to the central branch does not switch on these growth signals, while damage to the peripheral branch does." | |
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