| Winter 07: New Voices at BME
Rensselaer’s junior biotech faculty tackle everything from back pain to biophotonics
Undoing Nerve Damage
Deanna Thompson: Undoing Nerve Damage |
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Neurite outgrowth on oriented (above) and un-oriented (below) cellular substrates. |
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As it turns out, nerves that are “beyond repair” actually aren’t.
“Damaged neurons have demonstrated the capacity to regrow if given the proper microenvironment,” said Deanna Thompson. “Our goal is to examine the microenvironment of injured nerves to understand the conditions that would promote regrowth.”
At Rensselaer, Thompson is studying cell-cell interactions and other guidance cues to which regenerating neurons are responsive after injury. One of her projects involves the orientation of Schwann cells—which wrap peripheral nerves with myelin, thus insulating them—and their effect on nerve repair.
“In vivo, non-neural cells at the injury site, like Schwann cells, influence neuronal regrowth, but we’re limited in our ability to examine these in vivo interactions from a quantitative standpoint,” Thompson said. “By using primary rat neurons and non-neural cells, we’re looking to understand the cues from these cells and how they guide neurite outgrowth in an engineered microenvironment.”
Thompson’s research has drawn her into collaboration with her Rensselaer peers as well. Recently, she was awarded an IDEA grant from the New York State Spinal Cord Injury Research Board to investigate a bioscaffold in collaboration with the Stegemann lab.
All these research directions could end up making a profound difference in hundreds of lives. “It’s my hope,” she said, “that one day my work, or the work of another researcher, will find a cure to neural trauma that often results in paralysis.”