Verhaagen Group

Joost Verhaagen:

What is the problem you are faced with?

We are looking for ways to promote nerve cell recovery after nerve injury. To do this, we need to understand the mechanisms that impede recovery and find a way to deliver the molecules that stimulate recovery to the damaged nerve cells’.

How did you go about it?

‘Nerve cells in the brain and in the spinal cord are unable to activate the right steps needed to repair the damaged nerve fibres. But nerve cells outside the central nervous system do heal, because they have molecules that powerfully stimulate the repair. We know which genes are responsible for this and we can use them. We deliver them to the damaged nerve cells through gene therapy. This is an efficient and very accurate method of targeting a neuroactive and potentially therapeutic gene with the aim of promoting recovery’.

Another reason why recovery fails is that inhibitory proteins surrounding damaged nerve fibres hamper recovery. We found out that a protein called Semaphorin3A, which impedes the growth of nerve fibres, is created in damaged spinal cord tissue.’

‘We recently discovered that Semaphorin3A is also part of so-called perineuronal nets,’ explains Verhaagen. ‘These are net-like structures surrounding nerve cells. They stabilize the contacts between nerve cells and play a key role in repair processes in the brain and in learning and memory. Changes in these structures also influence the course of neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease’.

How do you see the future?

I expect that gene therapy with growth-promoting genes and gene therapy with the aim of changing these net-like structures will become an important approach for the promotion of recovery and brain plasticity. In the future, it may be that research into perineuronal nets during normal processes, such as learning and memory, and in brain disorders, may provide unexpected treatments for brain diseases.’