Two-Pronged Approach Enhances Nerve Cell Regeneration

Researchers have developed a two-pronged approach for stimulating damaged nerve cells in the eye to regenerate.

Investigators at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA, USA) worked with rats whose optic nerves had been damaged. Two different treatments were applied to stimulate repair of the damaged nerve tissue. The first approach was to damage the lens of the rat's eye in order to attract macrophages to the area. The macrophages released growth factors that stimulated the nerve cells to grow. In order to remove inhibitory proteins from surrounding myelin tissue, the investigators used a viral vector to transfer a gene into the myelin. This gene produced a protein that prevented the myelin proteins from inhibiting growth.

The investigators reported in the February 18, 2004, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience that they achieved about three times more regeneration of nerve fibers than previously attained.

"When we combined these two therapies, activating the growth program in nerve cells and overcoming the inhibitory signaling, we got very dramatic regeneration,” explained senior author Dr. Larry Benowitz, associate professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. "The amount of axon regeneration was not enough to restore sight, but was about triple that achieved by stimulating growth factors alone.”




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