Stroke treatment in recent years has focused on halting strokes as they occur or preventing damage to brain cells in the hours after a stroke occurs. Afterward, rehabilitation has been the only option. Doctors have never been able to repair brain cell damage once it occurs. Stroke is the third leading cause of death and the leading cause of serious long-term disability in the United States. A stroke, or brain attack, occurs when the brain's blood supply is interrupted, either by a blockage in an artery or a sudden bleed.
Brain cells die when deprived of the oxygen in blood.
The body cannot replace a dead brain cell. The Pitt doctors used cells developed in the laboratory of Virginia M.-Y. Lee, a neurobiologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Rather than use fetal cells, Lee and her colleagues took a mixture of cells from a human cancer tumor. The Penn researchers use retinoic acid to make the progenitor cells non-cancerous and to push them to develop into brain cells, or neurons. Lee and collaborators from the University of South Florida reported in February in the journal Experimental Neurology that infusions of the engineered neurons had restored brain function in rats who had artificially induced strokes.