Aberdeen University researchers – Dr. Wenlong Huang, Dr. Derryck Shewan, and Dr. Alba Guijarro-Belmar – found a novel way to repair injured spinal nerves. In experiments with rats, they achieved significant regrowth of the animals’ severed nerves when they activated a molecule found in nerve cells called Epac2.
When nerves are severed following a spinal cord injury, they do not regenerate. That’s why people end up with life-long losses in motor function and sensation after an accident. That’s also why the findings of this research could be revolutionary. It’s the first time anyone’s been able to boost nerve growth by triggering the molecule Epac2.
Dr. Shewan said:
Adult spinal nerve cells have very limited ability to regrow which makes recovery from spinal cord injury very difficult. 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 that other researchers have tried around the world in many different ways, but we found that our method actually works and is also very efficient.
The study began with the team modeling human spinal cord injury in rat nerve cells in a cell-culture dish. The treatment was administered using hydrogel. It’ a minimally invasive dual-function technique that:
- carries the treatment molecule to the injured region and then slowly releases them locally.
- provide a scaffold that supports injured nerves across the injury site.
Dr. Huang explained:
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. The use of self-assembling hydrogel technology in spinal cord injury is relatively new and if it were to be used by neurosurgeons, could provide a more precise and less intrusive treatment than traditional invasive surgery. Our research found that by targeting Epac2, we could potentially improve the mobility of rats with spinal injury. This is an exciting discovery with tremendous potential for the future treatment of spinal injury patients.
After everything went well in the dish, the team injected the Epac2 activating hydrogel into rats with spinal injuries. Yet again, the treatment worked. The rats showed improvements in walking ability. Furthermore, the researchers found that Epac2 not only stimulated growth, but it also changed the environment at the injury site, making it more suitable for nerve healing.
Dr. Huang continued:
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. The injured spinal nerves not only regenerated more robustly, but they also sensed the surrounding environment was not as inhibitory anymore, so the damaged nerves could more successfully regrow and cross the injury site.
Mark Bacon, Executive and Scientific Director from International Spinal Research Trust who partly funded the research, added:
Repairing the damaged spinal cord remains one of the greatest challenges in medicine. Discoveries such as this are paving the way to effective treatments that one day will help restore functions many of us take for granted.
A different team of researchers from the Lewis Katz School of Medicine Temple University (LKSOM) also found a way to fix nerves. However, their strategy involves boosting the expression of a molecule called Lin28, which is a protein that regulates cell growth. Their experiments with mice that had spinal cord injuries demonstrated that Lin28 helped the animals regain movement and feeling.
