RESEARCHERS at a Scottish university have found a new way to repair injured spinal nerves, after they regrew significantly in rats when a specific molecule in nerve cells was activated.
Doctors Wenlong Huang, Derryck Shewan and Alba Guijarro-Belmar, from the Institute of Medical Sciences at the University of Aberdeen, found that activation of a molecule called Epac2 resulted in significant improvement in the regrowth of nerves which had been severed following spinal cord injury.
It is the first time the activation of Epac2 has been found to enhance nerve growth following spinal cord injury.
In their study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers modelled human spinal cord injury in rat nerve cells in a cell-culture dish.
The treatment was delivered using hydrogel – a new dual-function technique that can carry treatments to a specific area and slowly release locally. It can also provide a “scaffold” to support injured nerves across an injury site.
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In another first, not only did Epac2 stimulate growth, but the researchers also found it changed the internal environment at the injury site, making it more amenable to nerve regrowth and healing.
Following this success, the team conducted pilot work injecting the Epac2 activating hydrogel into rats with spinal injuries. Again, this was successful, and the rats showed significant improvement in their ability to walk.
Shewan said: “We knew that Epac2 molecules are important for nerve growth during embryonic development so it is logical that it may have the same effect on adult nerve cells – encourage them to regenerate. This is something other researchers have tried around the world in many different ways, but we found that our method actually works and is also very efficient.”
Guijarro-Belmar said they also found something else that had never been reported before.
“We thought that the Epac2-activating drug would ‘turbo-charge’ the injured nerve cells, helping them to repair, but we also found that it can profoundly reduce the inhibitory nature of the environment around the injury site, so it also influences recovery in that way,” she said.
“The injured spinal nerves not only regenerated more robustly, they sensed the surrounding environment was not as inhibitory anymore, so the damaged nerves could more successfully regrow and cross the injury site.”
Huang added: “Currently there is no cure for spinal cord injury, so our mission is to find better strategies to help the injured spinal nerves to regrow.”
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