Protein that improves mobility after spinal cord injuries
An international team of scientists coordinated by UAB and CIBERNED researcher Rubén López Vales has established that interleukin-37 (IL-37), a cytokine belonging to the interleukin-1 family, promotes locomotor recovery in acute spinal cord injuries.
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This work shows for the first time that IL-37 suppresses the inflammatory response after a spinal cord injury and minimises spinal tissue degeneration and functional disabilities. Although IL-37 was identified 15 years ago, studying its function has proven difficult as it is not synthesised in mice.
The team led by Dr Rubén López – of the UAB's Department of Cell Biology, Physiology and Immunology and Institute of Neuroscience, and the Centre for Networked Biomedical Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED) – used a genetically modified mouse that produces the human form of IL-37 to study the function of this protein. They have shown that if IL-37 is administered immediately after the injury the mice recover a certain degree of mobility.
This work has therefore led to the discovery of a new therapeutic strategy to treat acute spinal cord injuries, for which currently there is no effective treatment available for clinical use. This discovery could also open the door to treatments for other neurodegenerative illnesses, as the inflammatory response also plays a major role in these.
The study, published recently in the online version of the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was carried out at the UAB, with collaboration from Radboud University Medical Center (the Netherlands), University of Colorado (USA) and Maximilian University of Munich (Germany), and was funded principally by the Fundació La Marató, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and the International Foundation for Research in Paraplegia.