The spinal cord was "glued together"
Scientists have used stem cells for the first time to repair the spinal cord
California molecular biologists and physicians have successfully used stem cells for the first time to regenerate spinal cord tissue, restoring full mobility to the limbs of mice with a damaged spine, according to an article published in the journal Nature Medicine (Kadoya et al., Spinal cord reconstruction with homologous neural grafts enables robust corticospinal regeneration).
"The spinal cord is the most important part of the human motor system. Many people tried to restore it, including us, and all such attempts failed. This time we tried to use "blanks" of neurons from stem cells, and, to our great surprise, they started the process of spinal cord regeneration," said Mark Tuszynski from the University of California at San Diego (in a press release Stem Cells Used to Successfully Regenerate Damage in Corticospinal Injury – VM).
According to Tushinsky and his colleagues, in recent years scientists have managed to achieve partial restoration of limb mobility after spinal injury in experiments on rats and mice, using electrical stimulation of the damaged part of the spinal cord and special "charging".
The problem is that such a recovery did not give the rodents full control over their limbs – they could make reflex movements, but could not consciously control their movements. This was due to the fact that these methods of spinal cord treatment did not lead to the restoration of the so–called cortical axons - nerve endings connecting the centers of movement in the brain with the spinal cord.
Tushinsky's group tested whether it is possible to completely restore the spinal cord using embryonic stem cells that have been turned into "blanks" of neurons and other types of nervous tissue, as "glue" gluing the halves of the spinal cord with an insert of intact neurons extracted from another part of the body.
Having grown a culture of such cells, the scientists injected them into the spines of several rats whose spinal cord was completely cut into two halves two weeks before the start of the experiment.
Scientists did not expect success, but stem cells were able to stimulate the growth of new nerve endings that connected the damaged parts of the spinal cord and reconnected it to the motor centers in the brain. About six weeks after the start of the experiment, the mobility of the mice was mostly restored, and they began to move freely around the cage.
According to Tushinsky, a similar success was achieved using not mouse, but human stem cells extracted from the future spine of the embryo in the ninth week of its formation. This success, according to the scientist, opens the way for the application of this technique among people.
"We still have a lot of work to do in order to start using this technique for human treatment. We need to understand what negative and positive changes for animal health this therapy entails in the long term, and come up with methods for adapting it for use in clinical experiments. In addition, we still need to understand which stem cells are best suited for this," the scientist concludes.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
29.03.2016