Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) and the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) have shown that treatment using gene therapy leads to a faster recovery after nerve damage. By combining a surgical repair procedure with gene therapy, the survival of nerve cells and regeneration of nerve fibers over a long distance was stimulated for the first time. The discovery, published in the journal Brain, is an important step towards the development of a new treatment for people with nerve damage.

During birth or following a traffic accident, nerves in the neck can be torn out of the spinal cord. As a result, these patients lose their arm function, and are unable to perform daily activities such as drinking a cup of coffee. Currently, surgical repair is the only available treatment for patients suffering this kind of nerve damage. “After surgery, nerve fibers have to bridge many centimeters before reaching the muscles and nerve cells from which new fibers need to regenerate are lost in large numbers. Most regenerating nerve fiber do not reach the muscles. The recovery of arm function is therefore disappointing and incomplete,” explains researcher Ruben Eggers of the NIN.

Belgian scientists have come to the surprising finding that vesicles coming from gut bacteria, are present in blood of patients with HIV, inflammatory bowel disease and cancer. Due to the increased permeability of the intestinal wall in these patients, bacterial vesicles end up in the bloodstream and can influence the immune system. This research sheds new light into the way the gut bacteria can communicate with different organs in the human body and is published in the scientific journal Gut.

Our body lives in symbiosis with trillions of bacteria. Most of these bacteria are located in the colon and a disturbance in this intestinal flora has recently been linked to the development of diseases such as diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease, HIV and cancer. Gut bacteria communicate with each other, but also with human cells, using different molecules (proteins, RNA, DNA,…). These molecules can be packaged in unique small particles that are formed by bacterial cells, bacterial extracellular vesicles.

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A protein-secreting device implanted into the hippocampus of epileptic rats reduces seizures by 93 percent in three months, finds preclinical research published in JNeurosci. These results support ongoing development of this technology and its potential translation into a new treatment for epilepsy.

Motivated by an unmet need for effective and well-tolerated epilepsy therapies, Giovanna Paolone and colleagues of the University of Ferrara, Italy and of Gloriana Therapeutics, Inc. (Providence, RI) investigated the effects of the Gloriana targeted cellular delivery system for glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF)—a protein recent research suggests may help suppress epileptic activity.

In addition to quickly and progressively reducing seizures in male rats—by 75 percent within two weeks—the researchers found their device improved rats’ anxiety-like symptoms and their performance on an object recognition task, indicating improvement in cognition.

A compelling new study from an international team of researchers has described a novel protein could be a useful blood-based biomarker to monitor the progression of Alzheimer’s disease over a decade before any clinical symptoms appear.

RealClearScience.