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As part of MooseJawToday.com’s coverage for Brain Injury Awareness Month, we spoke to Dr. Cindi Morshead about the possibilities her research offers for healing strokes, traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), Alzheimer’s disease, and more.
“I’m a professor at (the University of Toronto), and I have a regenerative medicine lab,” Morshead said. “Stem cells are really my area of expertise, and of course their application to regenerative medicine is obvious. We’ve recently started working with gene therapy, which is a little step away from stem cells, but still in the mindset of repairing the injured brain.”
Dr. Morshead is a tenured professor and Chair of the Division of Anatomy, Department of Surgery at the University of Toronto (UT). She is cross-appointed to the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, and the Rehabilitation Science Institute, and is a member of various other prestigious research organizations.
She has also won awards for her research and teaching, such as the 2019 Lister Prize in the UT surgery department.
Morshead wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the location of neural stem cells in the brain. Even the idea that the body had its own reservoirs of stem cells was mind-blowing at that time. Her research since has focused on the biology of neural stem cells, and their application to regenerative medicine.
“No one thought the brain could regenerate, so what would it need a stem cell for?” Morshead explained, referencing the initial discovery. “We were always told those stories of how if you have an accident, or if you do too many drugs, you lose your neurons, and you can never get them back.”
That has turned out to be untrue — the brain can adapt and, to a lesser extent, even repair itself in response to injury. However, the capacity is limited.
Regenerative medicine focuses on enhancing the body’s ability heal itself. Stem cells are a type of cell that can become anything. They hold the potential to repair, well, everything.
“Stem cells are thought to be the building blocks for the entire body,” Morshead said. “The idea is either to isolate those stem cells and transplant them back into damaged tissue. … Or the other idea is to harness their potential, if we know where they are and what types of molecules activate them.”
Many approaches have been tried. Research that Morshead said was “earth-shattering” has discovered that stem cells can be made from other cells. It was previously believed that once a cell has finished development, it is what it is and can’t be changed.
“It changed everything about how we think about cellular dynamics and tissue growth.”
Dr. Morshead and her lab are taking regenerative medicine to the next level by experimenting with genetically altering existing cells to shortcut that process. Instead of creating a stem cell, putting it where it needs to be, and letting it become a brain cell, for example — potentially either relieving or, one day, outright curing damage caused by a stroke or by Parkinson’s disease — her research will one day lead to direct conversion of existing cells.
“So what we’ll do with gene therapy is we’ll take another mature cell type in your brain, and we’ll turn it into a neuron,” Morshead said. “We’ll give it messages with our gene therapy that tell it make a new neuron — one of the cells we lost.”
She noted that trying to simplify the actual research is a bit ridiculous. The brain is the most complex structure that science is currently aware of: 86 billion neurons, each connected to up to 10,000 others, all signalling each other about once each second.
Human applications for Morshead’s studies are at least five to 10 years away, probably more. Nevertheless, she is extremely excited. Although the focus of her research is repairing damage, specifically from strokes, there are indications that creating new cells can benefit anyone.
