We have over 100,000 patients with spinal cord injury, and they are forced to live the rest of their life in a wheel chair depending on the site of injury. However, no effective treatment is currently available. Thus, the development of novel treatments is urgently needed.
Recently, transplantation of several kinds of cells for regenerative medicine has attracted a great deal of attention. We have focused on bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs), and shown the efficacy of BMSC-transplantation for nerve regeneration. Notably, we reported that soluble molecules expressed by BMSCs involved in functional recovery from spinal cord injury when BMSCs were transplanted through the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and the nerve regenerative effect of BMSC-transplantation was sustained for a long time after disappearance of the transplanted BMSCs. These results suggested that trophic factors from BMSCs act not only on spinal cord lesion but also on the brain through the CSF in a systematic manner.
Choroid plexus epithelial cells (CPECs), which produces the CSF, is known to express various neurotrophic and growth factors such as IGFs, FGFs, and EGF. Thus, it is assumed that CPECs contributes to the repair and protection of the central nerve system through the CSF. We therefore undertook the identification of CPEC-derived nerve regeneration factors that were upregulated in the presence of BMSCs using CPECs-BMSCs co-culture system. Quantitative PCR revealed that mRNA levels of several growth factors such as β-NGF were upregulated by the presence of BMSCs. Further investigation is ongoing to identify other potent molecules.