Synthetic structures seeded with neuron-producing human stem cells can help rodents with severe spinal cord damage to regain mobility, early results from animal tests suggest. Researchers hope that the approach might one day help to heal nervous system injury in humans.
Evan Snyder, at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, US, and his colleagues designed special scaffolds to hold the neural stem cells. The tiny scaffolds – just a few millimetres in size - are made partly out of polylactic glycolic acid, the same material used for dissolvable sutures. Once implanted into the body of laboratory animals the scaffolds vanish leaving the stem cells in place.
In 2002, Snyder and his colleagues reported scaffolds containing neural stem cells from mice promoted the healing of spinal cord damage in rats (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.052678899).
At the 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in St Louis, Missouri, he told NewScientist.com that his team has seen similar improvements in rodents that received the biodegradable implants containing human neural stem cells.
"Preliminary evidence shows that this works just as well using human cells, and the human cells would be suitable for clinical interventions," says Snyder.
Scoring gains
The team used a standard 21-point scale to rate the level of spinal cord function in the laboratory animals in which a score of zero indicates complete paralysis and 21 represents complete mobility.
The preliminary data showed that rodents given the tiny implants containing human stem cells can recover from spinal cord injury up to 14 on the scale. Snyder notes that this represents considerable progress: "Twelve is the dividing line where you start getting reasonable functional improvement." The control animals that receive no stem cells score only about 3.
Snyder believes that the stem cells held in these "biobridge" scaffolds produce a positive effect by nurturing and sustaining the nerve cells in the recipient rodent. This is what he and other scientists refer to as the "chaperone effect". He adds that the scaffolding holds the stem cells in the right position to facilitate the reformation of tissue.
News courtesy of New Scientist
Stem cell scaffolds repair rodent spinal cord damage
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