Restore breathing
Laboratory neurons restored respiration to mice with spinal cord injury
Alexey Yevglevsky, Naked Science
Neurophysiologists from the Drexel University College of Medicine (Pennsylvania) have found out how to restore some of the spinal functions with the help of neural stem cells. Their work is published in the Journal of Neurotrauma (Zholudeva et al., Transplantation of Neural Progenitors and V2a Interneurons after Spinal Cord Injury).
Previous studies have shown that the body is able to recover independently after spinal cord injuries due to the growth of nerve fibers and the formation of new connections. Dr. Michael Lane's laboratory is interested in strengthening this ability. Here 's what Lane himself says about the early developments:
"Our previous study was one of the first to show that V2a interneurons promote spinal cord plasticity and help it recover. Now we have demonstrated that combining these cells with stem cells significantly improves the treatment process."
Neural stem cells (NSCs) produce neurons and glial cells during embryonic development. Interneurons are cells of the nervous system that transmit a signal from sensory neurons to motor neurons. Their diversity is so great that scientists at first did not know which ones to choose. V2a interneurons became part of the experiment also because the data indicated their important role in breathing.
Generation and Aggregation of neural Progenitor Cells (NPCs) and Interneurons V2a / Journal of Neurotrauma
During the experiment, interneurons were combined with progenitor cells and transplanted into 30 rodents with moderately severe spinal cord injuries. A month after transplantation, the donor cells turned into mature neurons in all the subjects, and the activity of the diaphragm muscles significantly improved compared to the control group.
According to Lane, in this work, the scientists focused only on one type of cell and one period of rehabilitation, so there is still a lot of work ahead of them.
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