A team at the Salk Institute, led by CIRM‑funded Professor Fred “Rusty” Gage, has developed a way to use stem cells to create astrocytes—the most common cells in the brain and central nervous system.
Astrocytes often get overlooked because they play a supporting role to neurons, even though they outnumber them by about 50 to 1. But the ability to grow astrocytes outside the brain could pave the way for better treatments for stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and other neurological disorders.
Astrocytes get their name from their star‑shaped structure. “Astron” means star in Greek, while “kyttaron” means cell. Astrocytes serve several essential functions. They provide physical and metabolic support to neurons, supplying them with energy. These cells also help detoxify and repair tissue by reducing inflammation.
However, studying astrocytes in the lab has been difficult. Existing production methods are slow, cumbersome, and often fail to replicate the cells’ full range of functions.
Finding a better way
Now a team at the Salk Institute, led by CIRM-funded Professor Fred “Rusty” Gage, has developed a way of using stem cells to create astrocytes that is faster and more effective.
Their work is published in the journal Stem Cell Reports. In a news release, Gage says this is an important discovery:
“This work represents a big leap forward in our ability to model neurological disorders in a dish. Because inflammation is the common denominator in many brain disorders, better understanding astrocytes and their interactions with other cell types in the brain could provide important clues into what goes wrong in disease.”
In a step by step process the Salk team used a series of chemicals, called growth factors, to help coax stem cells into becoming, first, generic brain cells, and ultimately astrocytes. These astrocytes not only behaved like the ones in our brain do, but they also have a particularly sensitive response to inflammation. This gives the team a powerful tool in helping develop new treatment to disorders of the brain.
But wait, there’s more!
As if that wasn’t enough, the researchers then used the same technique to create astrocytes from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) – adult cells, such as skin, that have been re-engineered to have the ability to turn into any other kind of cell in the body. Those man-made astrocytes also showed the same characteristics as natural ones do.
Krishna Vadodaria, one of the lead authors on the paper, says having these iPSC-created astrocytes gives them a completely new tool to help explore brain development and disease, and hopefully develop new treatments for those diseases.
“The exciting thing about using iPSCs is that if we get tissue samples from people with diseases like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s or depression, we will be able to study how their astrocytes behave, and how they interact with neurons.”
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Very interesting article! What fascinated me the most was the iPSCs. If science could find a way to take ordinary adult cells and transform them into fully functional nerve cells, humans could finally have a fighting chance against brain injuries. Since astrocytes wrap around the presynaptic terminal of a group of axons, improvements involving astrocytes could have benefits ranging from an increased efficiency in brain functions to a more likely chance of damaged neurons being able to relay their emergency requests for help.