(WYTV)- Doctors have always told us we have to act quickly during a stroke, before brain tissue starts to die.
Now the Ohio State University is working on new technology that could lead to a breakthrough in stroke treatment.
It can help patients recover even days later, after the brain has been damaged.. The technology uses ordinary skin cells loaded with specific DNA.
Once injected into the brain, these cells are trained to turn into blood vessel cells, growing new, healthy tissue. Now we’re back to a normal blood flow to the brain.
“We sort of rewrite the genetic code of the cell to some extent. so the cell sort of remembers that it has some sort of plasticity, it can become something else. And then with the right signals, we can tell that cell to become what we want that cell to become,” said Dr. Daniel Gallego-Perez of the Ohio State University College of Medicine.
It’s worked in mice. Researchers administered the special cells seven days after tiny mice strokes, within two weeks, the mice had 90 percent of their movement back and MRI scans showed that damage to brain tissue was reversed.
You still want to react as quickly as possible after a stroke, this isn’t ready for humans yet but it holds promise, and it might also work on Alzheimer’s.
