What sounds like great news has been reported in a study conducted by the Children’s Hospital Boston. Researchers caused mature neurons to recover and regrow vigorously after being damaged by temporarily silencing genes that under normal circumstances prevent healing.

I guess most of us wonder why we evolved in such a way that when our fingers or limbs are severed they don’t regrow, and why a severed spinal cord can’t just heal up. And, I guess we’ll never know the answer to that question, but the irrepressible forces of human ingenuity seem set to fix this problem once and for all.

Previous efforts at regrowing damaged nerves have focused on removing from the damaged region the molecules that inhibited regeneration, but this yielded only modest results.

The growth of neurons depends on a pathway called mTOR, which is active during early development but its activity is almost totally stopped in mature nerve cells. The researchers used genetic techniques to delete two key inhibitory regulators of the mTOR pathway, TEN and TSC1, in the brains of mice.

The mice then had their optic nerves severed and were left to fend for themselves (!), and after two weeks they found that 50% of the mutant blind mice survived compared with only 20% of the controls. The mutant mice experienced marked regeneration of their optic nerves, which continued to improve over time.

While genetic techniques were used to achieve this outcome (which means, essentially, that it’s not applicable to humans because at present we have no real way of modifying our DNA in this way), it’s an important proof-of-concept that will lead the way to the development of pharmaceutical agents that promote neuronal regeneration by targeting these genes.

So, it’s another step in the right direction, towards that day when we can all go out and enjoy extreme sports without the niggling worry that we’ll wind up in a wheelchair. I guess death itself is still on the cards for base jumpers et al., but by the time this technology matures, we might just have overcome that too.

Adapted from materials provided by Eurekalert