One more step in tissue regeneration. A team of scientists from the School of Medicine of the University of California in San Diego (USA) together with other researchers from Japan and Wisconsin have managed to grow functional tissue in a group of rodents using a technique with stem cells. The study has been published in the journal Nature Medicine .
Stem cells form the basis of regenerative medicine. This occurs when the body tissue manages to grow again after having suffered damage, whether it is the skin, the liver …
The quality that stem cells have of being able to transform into specialized cells, which we call differentiation, allows the possibility of producing the tissues that the body needs; however, not all stem cells are omnipotent , as there are different types of stem cells with different regeneration strategies.
What type of stem cells would be suitable to regenerate damage from severe trauma?
Previous experiments had achieved a certain degree of functional recovery in mice after spinal cord injury, but until now, none had tried it with corticospinal axons , which humans do need to carry out voluntary movements.
For the experiment, in order to use corticospinal neurons for this purpose, the scientists introduced multipotent neural progenitor cells into the damaged areas of spinal cord-injured rats. To their surprise, the developed cells replaced the lost tissue and also triggered the formation of functional synapses that allowed the rats to move their forelimbs much more than they had previously been capable of.
Although there is still a long way to go, “the corticospinal projection is the most important motor system in humans. It has not been successfully regenerated before . Now, we will have to use larger animal models to develop ways to transfer the technology to humans, “says Mark Tuszynski, leader of the study.
