Brain Repair

Most efforts to develop therapeutics for brain injury have focused on preventing the cascade of events that cause cells to die. Now researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry (London, U.K.) and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (London) report in Neuroscience that they have developed a method that has potential for repairing damaged brain tissue.

The scientists have been able to replace ischemia-induced defects in rats subjected to 15 minutes of global cerebral ischemia by injecting them with an immortalized cell line derived from embryonic day 14 hippocampal mouse neuroepithelium. The immortalizing gene is a temperature-sensitive oncogene that is switched on only at sub-body temperatures and switched off after transplantation...