Cell growth technique brings hope of faster spinal injury treatment

Schwann cells are known to boost and amplify nerve growth in animals, but their use in humans suffering from severe nerve damage has been held back because they are difficult, time-consuming and costly to grow.

Now a team from Sheffield University has developed a new technique which overcomes all the problems, producing Schwann cells in less than half the time and at much lower cost.

The development could be a timely boost for ground-breaking trials in the United States which will examine using Schwann cells to reduce paralysis in patients with new spinal cord injuries.

Professor John Haycock, of the university’s department of materials science and engineering, said: “The ability of Schwann cells to boost nerve growth was proved many years ago in animals, but if you want to use this technique with patients, the problem is – where do you get enough cells from?

“To reduce immune rejection, the cells have to be grown from the patient’s own tissue. Of course, you want to take the smallest amount of tissue necessary, so the technique must be efficient. It must also be fast, so treatment can begin as soon as possible after injury. For clinical use, it must also provide pure Schwann cells. And finally, to make it viable, it has to be at a reasonable cost.”

Existing methods for growing Schwann cells promote the growth of another cell called fibroblasts, which swamp the Schwann cells, reducing the speed they grow and their numbers. This means that large amounts of tissue are needed to grow enough cells for therapeutic use, taking up to three months to complete.

Prof Haycock and his team have come up with a simple solution by feeding the Schwann cells but starving the fibroblasts. In a study published in the journal Nature Protocols, they produced Schwann cells in only 19 days with a much smaller sample of tissue.

The team is now testing the same method using human nerve tissue.

If their approach works with human tissue, the delay between injury and treatment could be substantially reduced.