Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

New hope for people living with the physical and mental impairments of traumatic brain injury has emerged from Clemson University. Assistant professor of bioengineering Ning Zhang used a combination of synthetic and natural materials in developing an injectable biomaterial that showed great promise for brain tissue regeneration in laboratory tests.

According to Clemson, the material “has the potential to spur the growth of a patient’s own neural stem cells in the body, structurally repairing the brain injury site.” In previous lab studies conducted with rats, Zhang demonstrated “the reconstruction of a complete vascular network at the injury site as an initial step toward brain tissue regeneration,” the university said.

Zhang’s findings, supported in part by a $220,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, provide hope for the growing number of American veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries, considered by many medical and military professionals to be the “signature injury” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zhang presented her research last week at the Military Research Forum in Kansas City. The purpose of the conference is to further improve the health and welfare of all American armed forces, their families, and the public at large.

“We have seen an increase in brain injuries due to combat, but our strategy can also potentially be applied to head injuries caused by car accidents, falls and gunshot wounds,” said Zhang.

Pentagon officials estimate that as many as 360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have suffered from combat-related brain injuries. Some 45,000 to 90,000 veterans have TBI symptoms that persist and require special care.

“These results that we are seeing in adult lab rats are the first of its kind and show a sustained functional recovery in the animal model of TBI,” Zhang told the conference. “It also represents one of very few in the traumatic brain injury field that attempts structural repair of the lesion cavity using a tissue-engineering approach,” she said.

According to Zhang, traditional TBI treatments, which often involve the use of drugs, have had limited success. With the new procedure, gel would be injected into the brain at the site of the injury “to direct the response of neural stem cells in the brain to regenerate normal brain tissue at the lesion site,” according to Clemson’s announcement.

Zhang says that the new procedure could be ready for human testing in about three year’s time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 9:12 am and is filed under News, brain injury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.