The CNIR's work focuses on the potential for promoting repair of stroke and other cerebrovascular disorders, traumatic injury, epilepsy, and movement disorders. Research is being done on aspects of acute brain injury, neuroregenerative potential, and the blood-brain barrier. The surgical treatment of these lesions has high associated risks.
Radiosurgical treatment is safer, but has a substantially lower success rate.
Gene therapy that increases the proliferation of endothelial and smooth-muscle cells within AVMs may concentrically narrow the vascular lumina and improve the chances for radiosurgical obliteration of these malformations. A second major research focus is subarachnoid hemorrhage. When intracranial aneurysms rupture, blood fills the subarachnoid space around the brain and can cause ischemic complications as a result of vasospasm. Some byproducts of blood cause vascular smooth muscle cells to constrict and reduce cerebral blood flow. By using transgenic mouse models, Dr Lawton is examining the protective effects of the hemoxygenase enzymes that metabolize the heme from hemoglobin and thereby eliminate these potentially harmful spasmogens.