July 22, 2022
COLUMBUS, Ohio – In a first-ever study, researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine show a type of cell found in the brain and spinal cord known as microglia promote repair after spinal cord injury in mice via specific genes, pathways and cellular interactions.
Microglia express immune factors and become activated in response to neural injury or disease. However, their role in traumatic spinal cord injury is not well understood, said lead author Phillip Popovich, professor and chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Ohio State and executive director of the Belford Center for Spinal Cord Research.
“We found that microglia promote endogenous repair processes that are essential for spontaneous recovery from experimental spinal cord injury. By sequencing the RNA of whole spinal tissue and individual cells in the spinal cord, we discovered novel genes and pathways that are controlled by microglia that help promote recovery,” said Popovich, who also is director of
His laboratory is an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to studying the complexities of central nervous system injury, inflammation and tissue repair.The study findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.
“These findings are important because they identify specific microglia-dependent repair processes that could be co-opted to repair the injured or diseased central nervous system,” said first author Faith Brennan, neuroscience research scientist at Ohio State who specializes in spinal cord injury studies.
Microglia are a dominant immune cell type in human and experimental spinal cord injury. However, understanding the role of microglia has been challenging for decades, since they are difficult to distinguish from other immune cells, particularly monocyte-derived macrophages, which accumulate in large numbers in the injured spinal cord.
“Fortunately, new pharmacological tools are now available that let us specifically deplete microglia, so we can now study their functional contributions in the normal and injured or diseased nervous system,” Brennan said. “This research indicates that microglia-dependent repair processes could be a new therapeutic target for spinal cord injury.”
Since microglia become activated as part of any disease of the brain or spinal cord, the current discovery could serve to improve research and promote drug discovery for multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury and other devastating neurological diseases.
Collaborators for this study included the laboratories of Qin Ma with Ohio State Biomedical Informatics and Zhigang He with Harvard Medical School, along with Ohio State neuroscience researchers Dana McTigue, Andy Fischer and Jonathan Godbout.
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Ray W. Poppleton Endowment, the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation and the Wings for Life Spinal Research Foundation.
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Media contact: Eileen Scahill, Wexner Medical Center Media Relations, Eileen.Scahill@osumc.edu