(Press-News.org) A new way to grow cells vital for nerve repair, developed by researchers from the University of Sheffield, could be a vital step for use in patients with severe nerve damage, including spinal injury (1).
Schwann cells are known to boost and amplify nerve growth in animal models, but their clinical use has been held back because they are difficult, time-consuming and costly to culture.
The Sheffield team, led by Professor John Haycock, has developed a new technique with adult rat tissue which overcomes all these problems, producing Schwann cells in less than half the time and at much lower cost.
"The ability of Schwann cells to boost nerve growth was proved many years ago in animals, but if you want to use this technique with patients, the problem is: where do you get enough cells from?" says Professor Haycock, from the University's Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
"To reduce immune rejection, the cells have to be grown from the patient's own tissue. Of course, you want to take the smallest amount of tissue necessary, so the technique must be efficient. It must also be fast, so treatment can begin as soon as possible after injury. For clinical use, it must also provide pure Schwann cells. And finally, to make it viable, it has to be at a reasonable cost."
Existing methods for growing Schwann cells from adult tissue promote the growth of another type of cell, called fibroblasts, which swamp the Schwann cells, reducing the speed they grow and their numbers. This means that large amounts of tissue are needed at the outset, to grow sufficient cells for therapeutic use. It also requires extra purification stages added to the process, making it slow and costly – taking up to 3 months to complete.
Professor Haycock and his team have come up with a very simple solution: feed the Schwann cells but starve the fibroblasts. The research, published today in Nature Protocols, uses an amino acid that only the Schwann cells can break down and feed off, and are able to produce a 97 per cent pure population of Schwann cells in a much shorter space of time – just 19 days – from a small sample of adult tissue.
Professor Haycock is confident the technique can be replicated in humans. His team are trialling same method using human nerve tissue, with results expected within the next 6 months.
INFORMATION:
(1) The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month authorised the first Phase 1 clinical trial in the USA into the use of Schwann cells to reduce paralysis in spinal cord injury. The trial will see Schwann cells cultured from leg nerve tissue injected into the spine of newly paralyzed patients. The treatment is expected to take place up to five weeks after the injury took place, a delay imposed by the time it takes to culture and purify the cells. If Professor Haycock's method works with human tissue, this delay between injury and treatment could be substantially reduced.
For more information contact:
Beck Lockwood, Campus PR, tel 0121 4511321, mob 0778 3802318, email beck@campuspr.co.uk
Campus PR on 0113 357 2100
Shemina Davis, University of Sheffield press office, tel 0114 222 5339, email: shemina.davis@sheffield.ac.uk
Notes to editors:
1. John Haycock is Professor of Bioengineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He is director of the University of Sheffield's Centre for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering and associate director of the Kroto Research Institute.
2. Current options for treating nerve injury in humans include nerve grafts, which means losing a nerve in another part of the body, or nerve guides, another area where Professor Haycock is conducting research (see http://bit.ly/QWzm59). Using Schwann cells cultured using Professor Haycock's new method, either on their own or with the conduit, could aid repair without loss of other nerves, as only a small amount of nerve tissue would need to be taken to begin the cell culture.
3. Integrated culture and purification of rat Schwann cells from freshly isolated adult tissue, Rossukon Kaewkhaw, Andy M Scutt & John W Haycock is published in Nature Protocols: doi:10.1038/nprot.2012.118
4. The research was funded by a PhD scholarship to Rossukon Kaewkhaw from the Royal Thai Government (Higher Educational Strategic Scholarships for Frontier Research Network, CHE-PhD SFR) to study at the University of Sheffield.
5. The Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sheffield - the 2011 Times Higher Education's University of the Year - is one of the largest in the UK. Its seven departments include over 4,000 students and 900 staff and have research-related income worth more than £50M per annum from government, industry and charity sources. The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) confirmed that two thirds of the research carried out was either Internationally Excellent or Internationally Leading.
The Faculty of Engineering has a long tradition of working with industry including Rolls-Royce, Network Rail and Siemens. Its industrial successes are exemplified by the award-winning Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and the new £25 million Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (NAMRC).
The Faculty of Engineering is set to ensure students continue to benefit from world-class labs and teaching space through the provision of the University's new Engineering Graduate School. This brand new building, which will become the centre of the faculty´s postgraduate research and postgraduate teaching activities, will be sited on the corner of Broad Lane and Newcastle Street. It will form the first stage in a 15 year plan to improve and extend the existing estate in a bid to provide students with the best possible facilities while improving their student experience.
To find out more about the Faculty of Engineering, visit: http://www.shef.ac.uk/faculty/engineering/
END
Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have developed a novel method for determining how ready acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cells are to die, a discovery that may help cancer specialists to choose treatments option more effectively for their patients who have AML.
In a study published in the Oct. 12 issue of the journal Cell, the researchers report that their findings may lead to improved tests to predict which patients successfully treated for AML can continue in remission with standard chemotherapy alone, and which patients are likely to relapse despite ...
New Haven, Conn. — New research led by Yale University scientists suggests that a rocky planet twice Earth's size orbiting a nearby star is a diamond planet.
"This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a fundamentally different chemistry from Earth," said lead researcher Nikku Madhusudhan, a Yale postdoctoral researcher in physics and astronomy. "The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite."
The paper reporting the findings has been accepted for publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The ...
Coral specialist Dr. Bert W. Hoeksema of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, The Netherlands, recently published the description of a new coral species that lives on the ceilings of caves in Indo-Pacific coral reefs. It differs from its closest relatives by its small polyp size and by the absence of symbiotic algae, so-called zooxanthellae. Its distribution range overlaps with the Coral Triangle, an area that is famous for its high marine species richness. Marine zoologists of Naturalis visit this area frequently to explore its marine biodiversity.
Reef corals in ...
Food marketers are masters at getting people to crave and consume the foods that they promote. In this study authors Dr. Brian Wansink, co-director of the Cornell University Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition and Professor of Marketing and Dr. Pierre Chandon, professor of Marketing at the leading French graduate school of business, INSEAD challenge popular assumptions that link food marketing and obesity. Their findings presented last weekend at the Association for Consumer Research Conference in Vancouver, Canada point to ways in which smart food marketers ...
For the first time, scientists have visualised an interaction between gluten and T-cells of the immune system, providing insight into how coeliac disease, which affects approximately 1 in 133 people, is triggered.
Published today in Immunity, the discovery was led by Dr Hugh Reid and Professor Jamie Rossjohn of Monash University, Professor Frits Koning of the University of Leiden and Dr Bob Anderson of biotechnology company ImmusanT Inc, based in the US.
An increasingly diagnosed chronic inflammatory disorder, coeliac disease affects the digestive process of the small ...
Providing healthcare staff with a one-day training course on dealing with the sexual needs of people with an acquired physical disability gave them greater understanding of the issues patients faced and enabled them to address intimate questions more comfortably and proactively.
The findings were so encouraging that the authors of the study, published in the November issue of the Journal of Advanced Nursing, are calling for all healthcare practitioners to receive sexuality training, regardless of their role or the area of healthcare they work in.
Researchers surveyed ...
Chemists at Queen's University Belfast have devised a novel, environmentally friendly technique, which allows the rapid production of Metal-Organic Frameworks porous materials (MOFs).
These revolutionary nanomaterials have the potential to transform hazardous gas storage, natural gas vehicles and drug delivery and have the highest surface-area of any known substance.
A sugar-lump sized piece of MOF material can have the same surface area as a football pitch.
Until now MOF manufacturing techniques have been limited as they are costly, slow and require large quantities ...
University of Luxembourg's Laboratory for Photovoltaics has established a method to observe and prevent solar cell degradation before solar cell production is finished, which has implications for the solar cell manufacturing industry since chemical damage to solar cells can occur quickly.
Solar panels are capable of converting light energy from the sun into electrical energy because they contain solar cells – the "power generators" responsible for the energy in solar panels. Thin film solar cells have a coating that is responsible for absorbing the sun's energy, but ...
A team of international researchers has provided the first comprehensive DNA evidence that the Addis Ababa lion in Ethiopia is genetically unique and is urging immediate conservation action to preserve this vulnerable lion population.
While it has long been noted that some lions in Ethiopia have a large, dark mane, extending from the head, neck and chest to the belly, as well as being smaller and more compact than other lions, it was not known until now if these lions represent a genetically distinct population.
The team of researchers, led by the University of York, ...
Philadelphia, PA, October 11, 2012 – A paper by Shizhong Han and colleagues in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry implicates a new gene in the risk for cannabis dependence. This gene, NRG1, codes for the ErbB4 receptor, a protein implicated in synaptic development and function.
The researchers set out to investigate susceptibility genes for cannabis dependence, as research has already shown that it has a strong genetic component.
To do this, they employed a multi-stage design using genetic data from African American and European American families. In the first ...
