Land of Gregs

In a press release Thursday, a rather important bit of research from Penn State’s Biochemistry and Molecular Biology department was described. This hasn’t been picked up by that many big news organizations though. In short, they’ve worked out which gene is turned off to stop nerves from regrowing themselves. It may seem a bit weird that they would look for such a gene, so a bit of background is required.
There are two types of nerves when it comes to nerve regeneration. Peripheral nerves and Central Nervous System (CNS) nerves. Simply put, peripheral nerves are the ones that go to the limbs and body, and the CNS nerves are the nerves in the brain and spinal cord.
Peripheral nerves tend to regenerate quite happily (albeit slowly, and often with reduced sensation), especially when given a little help from a passing surgeon.
CNS nerves are a different kettle of fish. When severed, they unfortunately tend to stay that way for a number of reasons. In the case of spinal cord injury, the inflammatory response, which is supposed to help, damages the nerve cells so they can’t regenerate. That’s why these days people are given an anti-inflammatory steroid as soon as they get to hospital and are kept on it for up to 48 hours. Unfortunately that often isn’t enough, as there are a number of other factors involved. This has led to research into repairing or bridging damaged nerves, from using stem cells to electrical stimulation below the damage.
This new research is quite exciting inasmuch as it helps us to understand what is actually going on with nerve regeneration. This could open the door to huge amounts of new research using the method described of controlling cell regeneration, which in turn could hopefully lead to treatments both for genetic spinal cord syndromes and spinal cord injury.
The paper is here.(Abstract, requires Cell subscription – which I don’t have either – for full text)