Athens, Ga. - It is well-known in the medical field that the pig brain shares certain physiological and anatomical similarities with the human brain. So similar are the two that researchers at the University of Georgia's Regenerative Bioscience Center have developed the first U.S. pig model for stroke treatments, which will provide essential preclinical data and speed the drug discovery process.
Often referred to by research teams as "the animals most like people," pig-derived medical products have a long history of use in humans and have improved the lives of countless patients. Pig heart valves are used to replace damaged or diseased human valves, diabetics may use insulin taken from pigs, and the blood-thinning drug heparin was first derived from a pig.
"Compared to mice, our large animal stroke model is a more rigorous test of potential therapeutics with findings that are likely more clinically relevant," said Franklin West, an associate professor in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and senior author of the paper describing the model.
Using their model, the team has shown that induced neural stem cells, or iNSCs, can replace stroke-damaged brain tissue and stimulate neuroplasticity-the brain's ability to naturally repair itself.
"This is the first time that a neural stem cell therapy has been tested in a large animal model with a brain more similar to humans," said Emily Baker, lead author of the study, who recently received her doctorate in neuroscience from UGA. "With greater predictive capabilities, there's a better likelihood of it working in a human."
Stroke is the cause of one in every 19 U.S. deaths and has an estimated annual cost of $315 billion — 56 percent higher than treatment associated costs of all cancers, according to the American Heart Association.
Despite the urgent need, almost all clinical trials of neuroprotective therapies to date have failed to translate from the laboratory to the clinic, according to the RBC research team.
Stroke therapies that worked on small animals such as mice more often than not proved ineffective in human strokes. With the failure of so many clinical trials, the concept of neuroprotection and the inability to demonstrate a regenerative action to restore and replace brain tissue has been the subject of many discussions in both research and medical communities.
Through this model, the research team was able to more precisely establish the repair mechanism by which stem cells work in neural tissue regeneration and neuroprotection than was previously known.
