Study gives hope to accident victims
February 2007Researchers in the School of Medicine’s Division of Regenerative Medicine hope to put an end to the nerve cell death that affects around 50,000 people each year, who suffer peripheral nerve injury following workplace, road and domestic accidents.
Professor Giorgio Terenghi and his team at the Blond McIndoe Laboratories have shown that, following nerve injury, a large proportion of nerve cells undergo ‘programmed death’- resulting in poor recovery of sensation. Now the team has also established differences between two distinct types of sensory nerve cells. Those supplying the skin die in large numbers in response to injury, but following treatment with clinically safe drug N-acetyl cysteine (NAC), this cell death is virtually eliminated. Sensory nerve cells from the muscle however die in considerably smaller numbers, and do not appear to respond to NAC.
Professor Terenghi said: “Despite considerable advances in microsurgical nerve repair, the outcome for these predominantly young and working patients is often very poor. This is an exciting development because the differing response of these two types of nerve cells provides a model to study the mechanism of nerve cell death, and the action of NAC.”
With the assistance of a research grant from the East Grinstead Medical Research Trust, Surgical Research Fellow Adam Reid is aiming to measure the expression of key molecules that influence the survival and death of the two groups of cells, as well as their response to NAC. He will use a new technique in which the cells are stained with fluorescent tracer which can be identified under a microscope, allowing him to isolate individual cells of interest to be cut out and captured by laser dissection.
