Stroke treatment method: Brain transplant
Brain transfusion from mouse to rat will save people from strokes
Alexey Tymoshenko, GZT.ruAn experiment on rats showed the promise of a method that could help people in the future: injection of donor nerve cells into the brain restored it after damage.
In the course of a study conducted by Indian scientists, the results of which are published in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience, rats with injections of a drug that kills nerve cells destroyed a certain part of the brain.
48 adult animals that underwent this procedure had impaired learning abilities, which was confirmed by tests: rodents could not cope with the standard task of navigating the maze even after multiple visits to it.
Rats with a destroyed subicullum (an important part of the brain for learning, memory and orientation on the terrain) have become the prototype of victims of stroke or other damage to the nervous system, scientists have worked out a new and quite promising method of treating dangerous diseases on them.
Transplantation, or rather transfusionAfter the animals' inability to learn new skills became apparent, the researchers injected cells taken from the brains of newborn mice into their brains.
The mice were genetically modified so that their neurons synthesized a green fluorescent protein.
The fluorescent label made it possible to clarify the fate of the cells injected through thin needles, which were not lost against the background of the surviving rat cells: green dots clearly indicated the success of the transplant. The cells took root in a new place, and two months after the transplant, neuroscientists examined the brain under a microscope, the structure of which was close to normal.
And, most importantly, the animals have recovered their ability to learn. In the new maze, they memorized everything no worse than the rats from the control group, who initially underwent a so-called false operation by injecting ordinary saline into the brain instead of a neuron-destroying drug.
Why is this doneThe control group should differ as little as possible from the experimental one.
People from the control group will be given starch tablets or injections of saline during clinical trials to neutralize the effect of procedures as such. Well, "idle" operations are often carried out on animals.
(The picture of Noldus, a manufacturer of experimental equipment, shows one of the tests for learning in rats and mice: the search for a transparent platform hidden in a pool of water. An invisible plexiglass island serves as the only exit from the circular tank.)
The prospects
Brain damage in humans after strokes or in the late stages of neurodegenerative diseases is a common cause of disability, and sometimes in severe form. Sometimes, of course, the brain finds a way to activate reserve mechanisms and partially compensates for damage, but often even a short-term interruption in blood supply during a stroke makes a healthy person disabled.
And if the heart, liver or kidneys can be transplanted from a deceased (and sometimes alive, if we are talking about one kidney) donor, then in the case of a brain transplant in the usual sense of the word disappears. Therefore, it is especially important for the medicine of the future that scientists from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurobiology of India used cells.
Progress in the field of work with stem cells allows us to hope that cell culture can be obtained in vitro by growing either from the patient's own stem cells or from donor material that will not fundamentally differ from donor bone marrow, which can be taken on an outpatient basis and without significant risk to health.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru11.12.2009