optic nerve

Experimental Treatment Helps Neurons Recover From Damage

Mouse Study Could Lead to New Therapies for a Variety of Ailments

neurons firing

In most parts of your brain, the set of neurons you’re born with is what you’ve got for life — just like your fingers and toes, if you lose any, they’re not coming back. The body does have ways to encourage healing after a brain injury, but they are extremely constrained. However, by lending those natural systems a helping hand, IRP researchers have managed to dramatically boost regeneration and recovery of vision in mice with damage to the nerves that connect the eyes to the brain, an approach that could one day help people recover from other types of nervous system injuries as well.

Tiny Molecules Have Big Potential for Treating Eye Diseases

Approach Could Protect or Even Regenerate Neurons in Eye and Spinal Cord

eye

At the end of Aesop’s fable The Lion and the Mouse, the titular rodent saves his much larger friend from a hunter’s trap. Just like Aesop, scientists know well that even something tiny and often overlooked can lend a helping hand. Extremely short strands of genetic material called microRNAs, for instance, could make for useful therapeutic targets for glaucoma and other degenerative eye ailments, according to new IRP research.

Meet Children's Inn Resident Connor O’Brien

Reblog via The Children's Inn at NIH: Family Stories.

Connor, Childrens Inn at NIH

In the words of Connor: “A lot of times treatment for cancer and chronic diseases is very difficult to sustain. A lot of times it hurts. A lot of times you have to be given anesthesia, invasive things like that. The Inn gives you somewhere to come home to, somewhere to end your day, a place where you can have closure. Thank you all for making sure we have The Inn to come home to.”