Canadian lab successfully re-grows brain cells in rats

CALGARY — Researchers at the University of Lethbridge will announce Friday they are the first in the world to successfully re-grow brain cells in adult mammals, which could be a critical step in the drive to find a treatment for such neurological ailments as Alzheimer’s.

“I think it’s exciting,” said Dr. Robert Sutherland, who led the project at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience.

His work involved killing off brain cells in rats’ hippocampi, thereby recreating a memory deficit like that seen in Alzheimer’s patients, then combining a naturally-occurring growth factor with behavioural and memory exercises to repair the damage.

“We re-grew that part of the brain and it appears to be functioning. That’s really the nub of it right there,” he explained.

After six weeks of treatment, the rats that received the three types of treatment were subjected to memory tests and fared just as well as those in a control group.

The team also dissected the brains of the test subjects and counted individual cells in order to confirm cell re-growth. Partial findings from the five-year project have appeared in eight peer-reviewed papers, he added, and the next step will be verifying the results in other labs.

Sutherland cautioned that it could be some time before the research results can be applied to human patients, but pledged: “I’m in my 50s; it will be before I’m retired.”

Even still, word of the research generated excitement among groups those whose clients could benefit, particularly those with dementia-type diseases brought on by the death of brain cells.

“Breakthroughs along these lines are exciting and give hope,” said Holly Roy, a spokeswoman for the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Alberta.

“This certainly does look very promising,” agreed Gloria Visser-Niven, spokeswoman for the Alzheimer Society of Calgary.

An estimated 481,000 Canadians were afflicted with dementia in 2008, according to the Alzheimer Society of Canada. The organization estimates the number will rise to 1.1 million by 2038, with annual care costs pegged at $138 billion.

If Sutherland’s work is validated, it should be “quite a significant” milestone in neuroscience, said Dr. Willem Wildering, who works out of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary.

Wildering warned, though, that “probably 99 per cent of the research and the ideas (scientists) start on that are scientifically sound will never pan out, and that’s unfortunately part of the business we’re in.

“But obviously the potential is enormous.”

Wildering wasn’t surprised to learn of possibly ground-breaking research coming out of a small, Canadian school. He said the University of Lethbridge has a talented neuroscience faculty with a good reputation.

Sutherland’s research actually built on top of work done at the University of Calgary by Brent Reynolds and Dr. Samuel Weiss, who is now director of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute. In the early 1990s, the two were the first to discover neural stem cells in the brains of adult mice, overturning conventional wisdom that mammals could not re-generate brain cells.

Sutherland said he was able to activate those neural stem cells using the a high concentration of “growth factor,” a naturally-occurring protein that stimulates cell growth.

His team in Lethbridge included post-doctoral trainee Jen Lai, doctoral candidates Simon Spanswick and Fraser Sparks, and other students. The work cost about $680,000 and was funded by the Canadian Institute for Health Research, which has renewed its commitment for another five years.

The Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience was established in 2001 and boasts a team of 16 investigators. It receives funding from a host of primarily government sources in Canada.