Now people suffering from Spinal Cord injury could avail a new non-surgical therapy which will help them to recover faster.

Kostantinos Meletis, a postdoctoral fellow at the Picower Institute, and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden developed an innovating non-surgical treatment for the debilitating spinal cord injuries with the help of spinal cord stem cells.

The stem cells are the cells that are found in the developing embryo. These cells can differentiate into all type of specialized tissues of the body. In adults, stem cells act as a repair system, replenishing specialized cells. The stem cells within the adult spinal cord proliferate slowly or rarely. Sometimes it may fail to promote regeneration on their own.

Recent experiments shows that if these stem cells are grown in a lab and are placed in the injury site, then they can restore some function of the paralyzed rodents or primates.

A study was done by konstantinos Meletis and his colleagues to find the subpopulation of stem cells, and their ability to repair damaged nerve cells.

They found that after injury, the ependymal cells (neural stem cells) proliferate and migrate to the injured area, and produces a mass of scar-forming cells plus fewer cells known as oligodendrocytes. These oligodendrocytes restore the myelin, or coating, on the nerve cells long slender, electrical impulse-carrying projections called axons.

If scientists genetically manipulate ependymal cells within the spinal cord and help them differentiating into more-healing cells and fewer scarring cells after an injury then it may help the portion to restore its function back without surgery.

Source: www.sciencedaily.com