New cells may restore destroyed brain tissue
injecting fresh nerve cells into the brains of tiny mice born with a neurological handicap, scientists said yesterday they have opened a potential new avenue toward treatment of serious brain diseases.
The new results offer the first evidence in live animals that neural stem cells can repair damage that has occurred throughout the brain. The findings may offer help for devastating childhood brain diseases, and perhaps eventually for multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.
Working with a strange breed of animals called "shiverer" mice, the three researchers at Children's Hospital in Boston found they can reduce or eliminate the shaking symptoms by implanting immature nerve cells. The new cells migrate to various parts of the brain, mature into the correct kinds of cells, and then repair much of the damage caused by a genetic defect.
"This represents a new set of strategies for approaching brain repair," said neurologist Evan Snyder, head of the laboratory where the research was done. "The idea of taking immature cells and putting them in (the brain) at the right time and right place could be very useful."
The researchers do not know if human neural stem cells will act the same as the mouse cells. And mouse experiments have not yet shown if the implanted cells work in older brains.
Snyder's team announced its results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the past decade many attempts have been made to overcome brain damage by implanting nerve cells, most often by putting already-mature cells into specific places to treat Parkinson's disease. The results have been spotty.
In contrast, Snyder's team uses immature nerve cells that have not yet decided what kind of brain cells they are going to be. The idea was to see if such cells would migrate to the right places in the brain, and then change into the kinds of cells needed. In shiverer mice, the injected cells did just that.