Restorative Neuroscience

HD Lighthouse Contributing Editor's Comment: 

The HD Lighthouse will continue to offer a beacon of hope to families coping with Huntington's Disease until all of our ships are home safe in harbor. That means that just preventing and treating Huntington's will not be enough. We need restorative technologies.

Research with conditional mouse models has been encouraging.  When mice are engineered so that the HD gene can be turned off, they recover quite a bit, even late in the disease.  Still, people who are well into the disease process, will most likely need restorative technologies to recover fully.

This review essay by Scandavian researchers provides a helpful overview of the progress made towards making these technologies available and the issues that still need to be resolved. 

-- Marsha L. Miller, Ph.D.
Posted to the HDL: 03-28-2008

Restorative Neuroscience: Concepts and Perspectives

Robert Andres, Morton Meyer, Angelique Ducray, and Hans Widmer

There is increasing interest in the search for therapeutic options for diseases and injuries of the central nervous system (CNS), for which currently no effective treatment strategies are available. Replacement of damaged cells and restoration of function can be accomplished by transplantation of cells derived from different sources, such as human foetal tissue, genetically modified cell lines, embryonic or somatic stem cells. Preclinical and clinical trials have shown promising results in neurodegenerative disorders, like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, but also ischaemic stroke, intracerebral haemorrhage, demyelinating disorders, epilepsy and traumatic lesions of the brain and spinal cord. Other studies have focused on finding new ways to activate and direct endogenous repair mechanisms in the CNS, eg, by exposure to specific neuronal growth factors or by inactivating inhibitory molecules. Neuroprotective drugs may offer an additional tool for improving neuronal survival in acute or chronic CNS diseases. Importantly however, a number of scientific issues need to be addressed in order to permit the introduction of these experimental techniques in the wider clinical setting.

Source: Swiss Medical Weekly 2008;138:155–172