The diagnosis of "paralysis of the limbs" very often sounds like a sentence to a person. Indeed, with one or another damage to the nerve fiber, it is not so easy to restore mobility or sensitivity. However, in the future, this may change, because a group of researchers from King's College London and the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience returned motor activity to experimental animals, which were completely paralyzed front legs.
As a rule, when the spinal cord or nerve pathways are damaged, the main reason that interferes with the repair of damage is scarring at the site of injury. In fact, there is nothing wrong with the formation of a scar itself - it is a protective reaction for the formation of connective tissue, but it becomes a problem in places of damage to the nerve trunks, because the scar tissue grows faster than the nerve tissue grows together. Now the main method of struggle is to remove scars and prevent their appearance, but this is not always possible.
According to the editorial staff of the Brain magazine, during the new research, scientists tried to "dissolve" the scar tissue and at the same time learn to control the process of its formation. To do this, they had to force the surrounding cells to produce chondroitinase, an enzyme that destroys scar tissue without affecting the nerve tissue. It helped in this, surprisingly, the antibiotic doxycycline. At the same time, as soon as the antibiotic was removed, the processes resumed. After 2 months of therapy, the rodents restored the activity of the forelimbs. As one of the authors of the work, Dr. Emily Burnside, said,
“After the treatment, the rats were able to carefully pick up and grab the sugar. We also recorded a significant increase in activity in the spinal cord of rats and believe that new connections have formed in the networks of nerve cells."
At the same time, the scientists decided not to stop there and developed a method that will initiate the production of chondroitinase at the genetic level, creating a kind of "genetic switch".
“Our approach allows us to control how long the therapy lasts. We can choose the optimal exposure time required for recovery. Gene therapy allows even serious spinal cord injuries to be treated with just one injection, and when the treatment is over, we can just turn off the gene with another injection."
At the same time, as always, there is a fly in the ointment: the new method has not yet been approved for conducting large-scale clinical trials in humans. Because first you need to get permission to use gene therapy, and this is fraught with a lot of legal delays. Therefore, the appearance of a new method in clinical practice can be very delayed.
Vladimir Kuznetsov
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