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.

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.

Investigators at the Weizmann Institute of Science have identified changes in oligodendrocytes that were shared across multiple dementia types. The team reported its results in the June 27, 2022, online issue of Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute have spurred neural stem cells to produce myelin-forming oligodendrocytes, facilitating repair after spinal cord injury.