Lessons to be learned from other fields?

It is time for another Society for Neuroscience meeting. Washington this year and it's cold and drab - feels like home. It's a slow start with most of the sessions devoted to spinal cord injury yet to come. Nevertheless, brain computer interfacing (BCI) dominated the afternoon's posters so why not take look here [Neuroprosthetics; BCI].

Without a specific session devoted to SCI there is the opportunity to look elsewhere. Amongst rows of poster on demyelinating disorders (for example, multiple sclerosis) I came across work by M Keough (University of Calgary, Canada) [#224.18]. Over the years much has been written about chondroitin sulphate proteoglycans (CSPGs) and their involvement in scar formation after SCI. CSPGs inhibit axonal growth and regeneration and are a major therapeutic target for repair. Treatment with the bacterial enzyme chondroitinase ABC - which digests CSPGs - and more recently treatment with inhibitors of the receptor for CSPGs, have shown positive effects.

CSPGs also interfere with cells called oligodendrocyte precursor cells which are involved in remyelination of axons. For diseases such as MS as with SCI, CSPGs interfere with potential repair and recovery so Keough and colleagues asked this simple question; what if we stop the formation of CSPGs? Since CSPGs are formed by the stepwise addition of multiple glucosamine subunits, introducing a subunit that cannot be added to may inhibit the formation of long mature CSPG chains. Fluorosamine is in every way identical to the natural subunit that are needed for the formation of CSPGs except for the presence of a single fluorine atom in the place of one of the carbon atoms in its structure. Treating scar-forming cells (astrocytes) in culture with fluorosamine reduced the amount of CSPGs formed whilst not affecting their viability. They went on to show benefits in an experimental model of demyelinating disease.

It will be interesting to see if this work is picked up by the SCI research community.