It feels like back pain comes for many of us at some point in our lives, and it’s tricky to treat. A new gene therapy, which repairs damaged discs and reduces pain, has shown promise in mouse tests.
The vertebrae segments that make up your spine provide support, but between each one is a rubbery disc full of fluid that cushions them, absorbing shocks and helping the spine be more flexible. Unfortunately, over time or through injury these discs can degenerate or even rupture, causing back pain that’s nigh on impossible to reverse. Pain management becomes the priority, and it can leave patients with limited mobility.
“Once you take a piece away, the tissue decompresses like a flat tire,” said Devina Purmessur Walter, senior author of the new study. “The disease process continues, and impacts the other discs on either side because you’re losing that pressure that is critical for spinal function. Clinicians don’t have a good way of addressing that.”
Now, scientists at Ohio State University (OSU) have tested a gene therapy in mice that can repair damaged discs. The team created “nanocarriers” out of cells from connective tissue, which mimic natural cells that carry messages around the body. These nanocarriers were then loaded up with genes that encode for a protein called FOXF1, and injected as a solution into damaged discs in mice.
“Our concept is recapitulating development: FOXF1 is expressed during development and in healthy tissue, but it decreases with age,” said Purmessur Walter. “We’re basically trying to trick the cells and give them a boost back to their developmental state when they’re growing and at their healthiest.”
Assessed over 12 weeks, injured mice that received the gene therapy were found to have a host of improvements compared to injured mice given plain saline injections. The tissue in the discs was found to produce more proteins that strengthen the tissue, and help it hold water. That helped them plump back up and act more like cushions again, improving the spine’s range of motion, load bearing and flexibility. While you can’t exactly ask mice how much pain they’re feeling, behavioral tests suggested symptoms were reduced.
This finding raises hopes of an eventual gene therapy for humans with chronic back pain, but of course at this stage it’s too early to tell if the results in animals will carry across. These experiments were conducted in young adult mice with acute spinal injuries, so the next steps will be to test it in older mice whose spinal discs have degraded with age, since that’s a common problem for humans.
The research was published in the journal Biomaterials.
Source: Ohio State University
