St. Jude Children's Research Hospital researchers have identified the cells that cause the eye cancer retinoblastoma.
The discovery overturns a widely held belief about the disease and opens up the possibility that scientists may be able to coax the injured brain into healing itself.
The St. Jude findings will be published in the Oct. 19 issue of the medical journal "Cell."
It has long been believed that mature cells in the eye's retina could not multiply like young, immature cells. The report's senior author, Michael Dyer, a member of St. Jude's department of developmental neurobiology, found that retinoblastoma can arise in mature eyes.
"For the past 100 years, it's been ingrained among scientists that differentiated mature nerves are so elaborate that they can't divide, and if they try to divide, they undergo cell death," Dyer said in a statement. "This is the first time that anyone has shown that under certain conditions, a fully mature and differentiated nerve can undergo cell division and multiply."
If researchers were able to alter the activity of certain genes in fully developed neurons, they might be able to trigger them to multiply temporarily and replace the neighboring neurons that were lost as a result of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Dyer said.
One approach would be to have nerves duplicate themselves instead of using stem cells, he said. Still, there is a lot of research required to see if the approach is feasible, he added.
Other authors of this paper include St. Jude researchers Itsuki Ajioka, Rodrigo A. P. Martins, Ildar T. Bayazitov, Stacy Donovan, Samantha Cicero, Kelli Boyd and Stanislav S. Zakharenko; Dianna A. Johnson from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and Sharon Frase from the University of Memphis.
This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, Research to Prevent Blindness, Pearle Vision Foundation, the International Retinal Research Foundation, the Whitehall Foundation, NARSAD (The Mental Health Research Association) and ALSAC.