Dr. Bloch together
with her colleague, a biologist Jean-Francois Brunet, purified miraculous brain
cells, which behave almost like stem cells, but with a slight difference. These
so-called doublecortin-positive cells comprising only 4% of the cerebral cortex
are able to turn into full-fledged neurons and build up the damaged areas of
the brain. To prove this, the researchers conducted the following animal
experiment with monkeys. They isolated a small sample of the brain from a
non-functional region thereof, and grew a culture of doublecortin-positive
cells from it. Hereafter the researchers tagged the grown cells with a special
dye and implanted them back into intact brain of the same monkey. Due to the tags
researchers could observe that the introduced cells eventually dissipated, they
just disappeared. Further, in order to understand whether these cells may
behave differently, researchers introduced the same tagged cells this time into
the damaged part of the monkey’s brain. Noteworthy, in this case the cells have
not disappeared. They remained at the site of injury instead and become fully-fledged
neurons. Moreover, the newly formed neurons not only built up the injury
physically, but also took over the functions for which this region responded
before the damaging.
More
details you can learn from the speech of Dr. Bloch:
Undoubtedly,
this is an amazing speech. I suppose that in perspective the study of Dr. Bloch
et al. gives hope to restore also the visual function to patients who have lost
their vision due to brain structures damage.
Also
the doctor’s speech pushed my thought further. As we know, the retina and the
optic nerve are also made up of neurons. Involuntarily a thought arises: what if these unique doublecortin
-positive cells are capable to differentiate (turn) into neurons, by being
implanted into the damaged retina or optic nerve? Maybe, it’s a crazy idea, but
I'll try to investigate the information to this end and surely will let you
know as soon as I find out anything.
