Hard to Treat Diseases (HTDS.PK) Dr. Sanja Pekovic, Chief Project Scientist, Chief Strategy Officer Slavica BioChem reported that IBISS research group from Serbia has begun preliminary experiments within a project aimed at Promoting stem cell graft survival in the model of traumatic brain injury in rats. One of the goals of this project is to examine the potential role of Ribavirin in promoting survival of the stem cells transplanted after brain injury.
The results of a pilot study in this project were presented at the Human Pluripotent Stem Cells symposium: interrogating disease and development, organized by Dr Stephen Sullivan and Abcam, Dublin, Ireland, April 22 - 24, 2009.
Neural stem cells (SC) are a promising therapeutic tool in CNS disease and injuries. However, there are a number of obstacles which have to be overcome in order to achieve a therapeutically beneficial outcome. These include the problem of inducing differentiation of multipotent grafted SCs into desired cell type, rejection of grafted SCs by the recipient's immune system and glial scar formation following the injury, which can present both physical and chemical barrier to SC migration and differentiation.
In our study, we detected that daily injection of Ribavirin for 5 and 10 days considerably decreased the degree of reactive astrogliosis after traumatic brain injury in adult rats. Decrease of reactive astrogliosis leads to downregulation of glial scar formation.
However, the beneficial effects that astroglial cells can exert on recovery after injury should not be neglected. Our group continues to test different duration times and timing of Ribavirin treatment, which we believe to be crucial in balancing the positive and negative effects that astrogliosis may have.