News Release

Feeding the Schwanns: New technique could bring cell therapy for nerve damage a step closer

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Sheffield

A new way to grow cells vital for nerve repair, developed by researchers from the University of Sheffield, could be a vital step for use in patients with severe nerve damage, including spinal injury (1).

Schwann cells are known to boost and amplify nerve growth in animal models, but their clinical use has been held back because they are difficult, time-consuming and costly to culture.

The Sheffield team, led by Professor John Haycock, has developed a new technique with adult rat tissue which overcomes all these problems, producing Schwann cells in less than half the time and at much lower cost.

"The ability of Schwann cells to boost nerve growth was proved many years ago in animals, but if you want to use this technique with patients, the problem is: where do you get enough cells from?" says Professor Haycock, from the University's Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

"To reduce immune rejection, the cells have to be grown from the patient's own tissue. Of course, you want to take the smallest amount of tissue necessary, so the technique must be efficient. It must also be fast, so treatment can begin as soon as possible after injury. For clinical use, it must also provide pure Schwann cells. And finally, to make it viable, it has to be at a reasonable cost."

Existing methods for growing Schwann cells from adult tissue promote the growth of another type of cell, called fibroblasts, which swamp the Schwann cells, reducing the speed they grow and their numbers. This means that large amounts of tissue are needed at the outset, to grow sufficient cells for therapeutic use. It also requires extra purification stages added to the process, making it slow and costly – taking up to 3 months to complete.

Professor Haycock and his team have come up with a very simple solution: feed the Schwann cells but starve the fibroblasts. The research, published today in Nature Protocols, uses an amino acid that only the Schwann cells can break down and feed off, and are able to produce a 97 per cent pure population of Schwann cells in a much shorter space of time – just 19 days – from a small sample of adult tissue.

Professor Haycock is confident the technique can be replicated in humans. His team are trialling same method using human nerve tissue, with results expected within the next 6 months.

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(1) The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month authorised the first Phase 1 clinical trial in the USA into the use of Schwann cells to reduce paralysis in spinal cord injury. The trial will see Schwann cells cultured from leg nerve tissue injected into the spine of newly paralyzed patients. The treatment is expected to take place up to five weeks after the injury took place, a delay imposed by the time it takes to culture and purify the cells. If Professor Haycock's method works with human tissue, this delay between injury and treatment could be substantially reduced.

For more information contact:
Beck Lockwood, Campus PR, tel 0121 4511321, mob 0778 3802318, email beck@campuspr.co.uk
Campus PR on 0113 357 2100
Shemina Davis, University of Sheffield press office, tel 0114 222 5339, email: shemina.davis@sheffield.ac.uk

Notes to editors:

1. John Haycock is Professor of Bioengineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He is director of the University of Sheffield's Centre for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering and associate director of the Kroto Research Institute.

2. Current options for treating nerve injury in humans include nerve grafts, which means losing a nerve in another part of the body, or nerve guides, another area where Professor Haycock is conducting research (see http://bit.ly/QWzm59). Using Schwann cells cultured using Professor Haycock's new method, either on their own or with the conduit, could aid repair without loss of other nerves, as only a small amount of nerve tissue would need to be taken to begin the cell culture.

3. Integrated culture and purification of rat Schwann cells from freshly isolated adult tissue, Rossukon Kaewkhaw, Andy M Scutt & John W Haycock is published in Nature Protocols: doi:10.1038/nprot.2012.118

4. The research was funded by a PhD scholarship to Rossukon Kaewkhaw from the Royal Thai Government (Higher Educational Strategic Scholarships for Frontier Research Network, CHE-PhD SFR) to study at the University of Sheffield.

5. The Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sheffield - the 2011 Times Higher Education's University of the Year - is one of the largest in the UK. Its seven departments include over 4,000 students and 900 staff and have research-related income worth more than £50M per annum from government, industry and charity sources. The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) confirmed that two thirds of the research carried out was either Internationally Excellent or Internationally Leading.

The Faculty of Engineering has a long tradition of working with industry including Rolls-Royce, Network Rail and Siemens. Its industrial successes are exemplified by the award-winning Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and the new £25 million Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (NAMRC).

The Faculty of Engineering is set to ensure students continue to benefit from world-class labs and teaching space through the provision of the University's new Engineering Graduate School. This brand new building, which will become the centre of the faculty´s postgraduate research and postgraduate teaching activities, will be sited on the corner of Broad Lane and Newcastle Street. It will form the first stage in a 15 year plan to improve and extend the existing estate in a bid to provide students with the best possible facilities while improving their student experience.

To find out more about the Faculty of Engineering, visit: http://www.shef.ac.uk/faculty/engineering/


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