Giving Compass' Take:

• Futurity reports on a new gene therapy which turns glial cells into neurons, repairing the damage that results from stroke and this has the potential to significantly improve motor function.

• How can donors help fund more research on the effects and recovery of brain diseases? 

• Here's another article on treating neurological damage caused by strokes. 

Once researchers further develop the NeuroD1-based gene therapy, it could potentially help to treat stroke, which is a leading cause of disability in the US, with 800,000 new stroke patients every year.

“The current treatment for stroke has a narrow time window, typically within a few hours after the occurrence of stroke,” says lead author Yuchen Chen, a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State. “Many patients cannot receive the treatment in time and as a result, often suffer from permanent disability caused by irreversible neuronal loss. There is an urgent need to develop a new therapy to regenerate new neurons and restore lost brain functions among stroke patients.”

The human brain has approximately 86 billion neurons. While mini-strokes can be tolerated, moderate stroke involving the loss of billions of neurons leaves detrimental effects that do not spontaneously recover.

“So, the critical question that is still unanswered in the neuroregeneration field is how can we regenerate billions of new neurons in a patient’s brain after stroke?” says Gong Chen, professor of biology and chair in life sciences. “The biggest obstacle for brain repair is that neurons cannot regenerate themselves. Many clinical trials for stroke have failed over the past several decades, largely because none of them can regenerate enough new neurons to replenish the lost neurons.”

Read the full article on gene therapy to help stroke recovery by Sam Sholtis at Futurity.