Topic: Scientists Identify Gene Essential for Nerve Regeneration (in worms anyhow)

[Nemesis]

Link to full article

Washington — Scientists have identified a gene required to repair severed nerve cells — a finding that could one day be used in the development of treatments for spinal cord injuries, according to a report published January 22 in the journal Science.

“We discovered a molecular target for a future drug that could vastly improve the ability of a neuron to regenerate after injury,” said Michael Bastiani, the University of Utah scientist who led the research team.

One caution is that dlk-1 needs to be activated at the time of injury — activation even two hours after neurons were cut with a laser failed to bring forth robust regrowth. Hammarlund acknowledges that this narrow window is a barrier to treating traumatic nerve damage in humans, but is confident that eventually “we’ll get there.”

“In the future, we would like to develop drugs that could activate this chain of molecular events in nerve cells and stimulate regeneration of diseased and injured nerve cells,” said Erik Jorgenson, a coauthor of the study and scientific director of the Brain Institute at the University of Utah. “At this point, we can’t do that. But this study gives us hope that in the future, we will have a rational approach for stimulating regeneration.”

[Bonk]

I am rather curious/concerned about this one. As if we model nerve regneration treatments in humans on the processes scripted by worm genetics, then patients treated so I expect will be more sensitive to deworming compounds found in dietary sources. (e.g. avermectins in pork and salmon - toxic to worms and lice by interference with neural action of gamma amino butyric acid.) Also there are exisiting human therapeutic uses of avermectins.

This is a tricky road to go down, to model modifications of our own biology to that of lower species, particularly parasites. Such drugs or therapies have a much larger chance of negative interactions with existing therapeutic regimes.

A good analogy might be software dependencies. You know what? It really is a question of software dependencies when you think about it. Far out.

[Nemesis]

I wouldn't expect it to be a problem.  I would expect that if they can track it in worms they will move up to "higher" forms (likely in stages) before trying anything on people.  Also even if the regeneration is triggered based on how the worm genes are triggered it will still be human genes triggering human cells to grow.

I expect trouble getting permissions to test this then trouble proving it works.  Its needing to be administered quickly means that they won't have the ability to select carefully who is given the drug and since mostly it will be accident victims there will be question about whether it helped or the injury wasn't really that severe.  Also of course there will be those who say "my injury would have healed except for the drug".