| 1 | Canadian Partnership for Stroke Recovery | Regenerative medicine: an exciting new approach to stroke recovery | 15181 | 124 | 16 | 53.7 | negative | 5:11 | For years and years we were taught in all of our neuroscience textbooks that you were issued with a fixed number of brain cells when you were born and then over the course of your life they just died and over time eventually you know you would be losing thousands and thousands of neurons but it turns out that that's not strictly true The age of 21 my health was really really good. I was a competitive athlete all my life I was way at University of Waterloo doing my undergraduate degree and I went to the gym with my best friend on my 21st birthday and before we started working out I started getting some numbness in my left side kind of like my grades I typically had. This numbness wasn't subsiding so I said forget the workout let's just go as we were leaving the gym I collapsed had a big seizure and was rushed to hospital and found out that I had an AVM massive brain hemorrhage did not see the stroke coming whatsoever neurogenesis really refers to the formation of new brain cells After a stroke you get this rapid increase in the proliferation of the stem and progenitor cells the dividing cells within the adult brain so this is important because those cells have the ability to become neurons but what actually happens is that those cells migrate towards the side of injury from the stroke but very few of them actually survive that migration so they just don't get to where they need to be and Then when they're there we know that the environment around the stroke is not very good So those cells actually can't incorporate and become neurons on their own Obviously one of the questions we have in basic biomedical research is how do we increase the number that can form new neurons and how can we make these better integrate into the circuitry within the brain? For repair to occur you need to have the blood vessels regrow and the blood flow reestablished we know in and around an area of stroke There are a lot of cells that are hanging in there But they are starved for oxygen their star for nutrients and the sooner you can improve the supply the more likely they will be to survive so if Dr. Legase was successful in finding ways to promote their survival Then potentially you'll have a resource right there in the damaged brain that can be ready to Repopulate the area of damage with new nerve cells. We're still learning a lot about this phenomenon But it's conceivable that down the road Five years or 10 years we would find even better ways to harness this phenomenon and encourage greater proliferation and migration of new cells to areas that have been damaged in the brain and Really be able to restore some of the function that was lost because of an earlier stroke I heard initially that you only get certain recovery after so many months But here I am living proof seven years later and I still find changes and there's thoughts promising research coming up to you to look forward to One of the most difficult questions as a basic scientist that I'm asked is how soon are we gonna be able to see this come to the clinic It took a long time to understand you know, workings or cells that took a long time to understand what stem cells were how they worked How the the building blocks of life the DNA Works in terms of controlling cells, but in getting that understanding we have now developed ways that we can actually Manipulate these things and use them therapeutically. Yes, it's taken 20 years But it sometimes takes that long to really develop the tools that you need that we can use effectively in patients We stop the research if we don't try to understand more about what's happening within the adult brain There will be no future in terms of understanding how we can enhance patients lives after a stroke Someone like myself who has had a stroke seven years ago in his chronic It's very hopeful to me to hear that they might be able to prepare the damaged Cells in my brain in one day and we get the use back in my hands. It would be so life-changing So neurogenesis research it's something that's fairly new With respect to stroke recovery, but it has tremendous potential for restoration of function if we can continue to make the inroads that we're making at present We're entering that new phase. So I think regenerative medicine is moving out of it It's been almost purely a research phase into one that's going to have important and perhaps dominant clinical application You You | ↗ |