Transplanted human glial cells could outcompete human glia in a chimeric mouse model of Huntington’s disease, inducing apoptosis. And younger health cells could outcompete older ones. The findings, which appeared online in Nature Biotechnology on July 17, 2023, help pave the way for testing glial cell transplantation as a therapeutic strategy in neurodegenerative disorders.
In brain research, be it basic or clinical, neurons have long hogged the limelight. But at the 2023 European Meeting on Glial Cells in Health and Disease, neurons take a back seat to glia – cell types that have often been described as support cells and treated as an afterthought, but that play critical roles in all aspects of brain function, including information processing.
“One of the many reasons we don’t have effective therapies for AD at the moment ... is that we don’t understand the beginnings of the disease,” Constanze Depp told BioWorld. Understanding those beginnings is likely to be a necessary prerequisite for truly turning the tide on Alzheimer’s disease (AD). “The brain is so bad at repairing itself, and once a neuron is lost, it will most likely not regenerate,” she elaborated. Now, Depp and her colleagues have reported on a contributor to those beginnings.
The loss of myelin in the cerebral cortex of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients could be recovered if oligodendrocytes, the cells that myelinate neuronal axons, work at a higher rate than they are destroyed. However, a group of scientists from the University of Munich have shown, in cortical MS mice, that this does not occur. The oligodendrocytes do not contribute to remyelination efficiently.
Myrtelle Inc. and Raaven Therapeutics AB have partnered on the development of novel recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) vectors to advance gene therapy treatments for diseases of the central nervous system (CNS) in which myelin is affected.
Research shows that microglia, macrophage cells found in the central nervous system, are needed to maintain nerve health by preventing the degeneration of the myelin sheath that protects neurons. The study, led by the University of Edinburgh and the University of Toronto and published on Dec. 14, 2022, in Nature, showed microglia could be a potential therapeutic target for neurological conditions involving myelin degeneration.
Researchers have demonstrated that enhancing myelin renewal in the brains of transgenic APP/PS1 mouse models of Alzheimer's disease (AD) can improve their task-related hippocampal activity.
Rising from Case Western Reserve in Cleveland was science that Roche Holding AG's Genentech Inc. could not pass up, so it struck a deal with Convelo Therapeutics Inc. to discover and develop remyelinating medicines for patients with neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis.
