A new animal study presents a novel immunotherapy approach with the potential to help improve outcomes for people recovering from spinal cord injuries.
Spinal injuries only account for part of the damage to the spine following an incident, with most damage being attributed to the degenerative process of the wound.
Research is taking place into repairing this damaged tissue, but now a team of researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a novel immunotherapy to minimise the damage from traumatic spinal cord injury.
According to the University, the findings show that immunotherapy can lessen such damage by protecting neurons at the injury site from being attacked by immune cells.
“Immune cells in the central nervous system have a reputation for being the bad guys that can harm the brain and spinal cord,” said senior author Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Pathology & Immunology and a BJC Investigator at WashU Medicine in a press statement.
“But our study shows that it’s possible to take advantage of immune cells’ neuroprotective function, while controlling their inherent detrimental abilities, to help in the recovery from central nervous system injury.”
T cells
Following an injury, immune cells flood the site – including T cells. According to the University, Wenqing Gao, PhD, postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Pathology & Immunology and the study’s first author, analysed T cells from the spinal cords of injured mice and performed a genetic analysis to decode their identities.
Wenqing discovered that the protective T cells can mistakenly attack the body’s surrounding tissues when activated for too long, causing autoimmune disease.
To improve the therapy’s safety, Gao modified the cells to shut off after a few days.
The results revealed that the mice given the modified T cells had better mobility than did the untreated mice, says the university, and the biggest improvements were seen when the cells were administered within a week of the injury.
“There are no effective treatments for traumatic injuries to the central nervous system,” stated Gao.
“We developed immunotherapy for such injuries by taking advantage of the protective immune cells that infiltrate the injury site and found that it dramatically improved mobility in mice.
“Our future goal is to devise a clinical trial to test the therapy in people with such injuries, while expanding this work to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) as well as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.”
“Although the initial trigger in neurodegenerative diseases is different, the subsequent death of neurons may very well be mediated by similar processes, opening an opportunity for adapting our engineered cells for use as a therapy in neurodegeneration,” added Kipnis.
