Healing Scar Tissue: Hope for Spinal Cord Injuries

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Researchers have developed a new enzyme to break down dense scar tissue that builds up on the spinal cord after central nervous system damage.

Chrondroitinase ABC (chABC) is an enzyme that must be applied to damaged areas after an injury to see degrade of scar tissue. In the past, chABC functioned poorly inside the body because it was sensitive to temperature. The enzyme would lose half of its activity within one hour and the rest by five days.

Now researchers say they have developed a delivery system that allows chABC to last weeks without implanted pumps or catheters. Researchers mixed the chABC enzyme with sugar trehalose, which miraculously stabilized internal body temperature and through vitro testing has lasted up to four weeks.

"This research has made digesting scar clinically viable by obviating the need for continuous injection of the chABC by thermally stabilizing the enzyme and harnessing bioengineered drug delivery systems," Ravi Bellamkonda, lead author and a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University in Atlanta, was quoted as saying.

SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2, 2009