New technique to heal spinal cord damage in rats

September 09, 1997 - London Times
Article by reporter Nigel Hawkes.

Scientists at the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, North London, have used a new technique to heal spinal cord damage in rats. Should the method also work on human spinal injuries the implications will be considerable. A succesful technique could enable thousands of people paralysed in accidents to escape from wheelchairs.

The difficulty is persuading the nerves in the spinal cord to grow and rejoin once they have been damaged. While some animals are able to do this, mammals cannot. Research at many laboratories around the world is devoted to establishing the circumstances in which nerve fibres will grow.

The Mill Hill scientists, Ying Li, Pauline Field and Geoffrey , caution that their results do not have immediate application in humans because the type of injury they were able to repair was relatively minor and of a kind unlikely to arise in human patients. It is, nevertheless, a major advance in the field and the team hopes to begin human trials within a couple of years.

The team report, in *Science*, that they succeeded in repairing spinal cord damage in rats by transplanting into the damaged area a type of cell from the inside of the nose, called olfactory ensheathing cells.

These cells are easily harvested and continuously produced. Their function is to provide the pathway through which nerves from the nose carrying the sense of smell grow into the brain.

The olfactory cells were removed from the rats, cultured and purified, and then injected into tiny areas of the animal's spine. The damage, less than half a millimetre across, prevented the rats from reaching out with their front paws and scooping food.

After the nose cells were injected the team observed the nerve cells at the point of damage repair themselves, and the treated rats were once again able to reach out - showing that the function of the nerve had been restored. This is the first time this has ever been done, said Dr. Raisman. "We are starting to examine the possibility of transferring the technique to humans", he says. "The principle is much the same as skin- grafting. We would take cells from the nose, grow them, then transplant them into the damaged area. The properties of the cells is critical - for instance, how many kinds of damage are they applicable to? We don't know the answer to that yet."

The team's paper contains an unusual dedication, to Diana, Princess of Wales, who opened the Norman and Sadie Lee reearch centre at Mill Hill in 1988. "She gave years of unstinting support to people in wheelchairs," the dedication reads. "Her untimely death prevented her from seeing this result, with which she would have been so pleased."

Support for the research has come from a British couple living in California, Norman and Sadie Lee, who have gived £ million pounds sterling through the British Neurological Research Trust.