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When your body is traumatized, its army of immune cells gets to work – cleaning up dead and damaged tissue and strengthening the defense of the injured area against infection. However, for the approximately 12,000 new cases of spinal cord injury seen each year in the United States, the body's immune system can often do more harm than harm, causing nerve damage, numbness, and even paralysis.
It is in this spirit that scientists from the University of Michigan have sought to bypass this overly reactive immune response and have discovered that an injection of nanoparticles aimed at suppressing immune cells could become the "EpiPen." Of the spinal cord injury.
"In this work, we demonstrate that instead of overcoming an immune response, we can cooperate with the immune response to work for us to promote the therapeutic response," said Lonnie Shea, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Toronto. UM, whose research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The central nervous system, which includes the spinal cord, is usually protected from our aggressive immune activity through the blood-brain barrier – an endothelial cell complex that helps to block toxins, pathogens and other dangerous substances from our body. the nervous system. overzealous immune cells cause a dangerous amount of inflammation to fragile nerve tissue.
However, trauma to the spine often leads to the breakdown of this barrier, causing rapid death of neurons, nerve damage that prevents them from sending signals throughout the body and scar tissue that prevents regeneration. nerve cells – leaving patients in a worse situation even after treatment. the wound itself is repaired.
Doctors used steroids, such as methylprednisolone, to suppress immune activity after spinal injury – in the same way that an EpiPen is used to soothe an allergic reaction – but this method was discontinued because of side effects such as sepsis, gastrointestinal bleeding and clots. .
On the other hand, this new discovery uses non-pharmaceutical nanoparticles that hijack the potentially dangerous immune cells from the spinal cord injury, while allowing the most helpful to undertake the repairs. Since nanoparticles are not drug-related, scientists believe that the undesirable side effects often associated with pharmaceuticals will be avoided.
Meanwhile, fewer immune cells will cause less inflammation and deterioration of nerve tissue.
"Hopefully this technology could lead to new therapeutic strategies not only for patients with spinal cord injury, but also for those with various inflammatory diseases," says Jonghyuck Park, UM researcher.
In the past, nanoparticles have also been shown to reduce the trauma of West Nile virus and multiple sclerosis.
"The immune system is at the root of autoimmune diseases, cancer, trauma, regeneration – almost all major diseases," says Shea. "The tools that can target immune cells and reprogram them to the desired response offer many options for treating or managing the disease."
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