Breakthrough Study Shows How Brain Healing Can Be Boosted Using a Key Growth Factor
Nikhil Prasad Fact checked by:Thailand Medical News Team Jul 30, 2025 2 days, 18 hours, 35 minutes ago
Thailand Medical News: Hope for Brain Repair Gets a Major Boost
A team of Spanish researchers has made a significant discovery that could change the future of treatments for brain damage and diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Scientists from the University of Barcelona, the Institute of Neurosciences, the Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS), and the Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red sobre Enfermedades Neurodegenerativas (CIBERNED) have found that a special brain growth protein called BDNF can improve how human brain cells grow and connect.
Breakthrough Study Shows How Brain Healing Can Be Boosted Using a Key Growth Factor
The research, done in lab-grown human brain cells developed from stem cells, shows that increasing the levels of this protein—called brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF—helps the brain cells mature faster and grow longer connections. These connections are vital for brain communication and healing.
This
Thailand Medical News report reveals that the researchers created a special version of human stem cells that produced extra BDNF, and then watched how these cells grew and behaved.
Stronger Neurons with Better Connections
In the lab, brain cells with added BDNF not only grew into mature neurons more quickly, but also showed more signs of activity—meaning they were “firing” or working like healthy brain cells. Even more interestingly, these active neurons didn’t form chaotic networks. Instead, they maintained organized structures, a good sign for their potential use in brain therapies.
Using a tiny chip that mimics parts of the brain, the scientists also discovered that cells making more BDNF were able to attract and guide the growth of other nerve cell connections toward them. This proves that BDNF acts like a natural signal, helping cells find the right place to connect and form new circuits—an ability crucial for healing after injury or disease.
What This Means for the Future
This breakthrough offers real hope for future therapies where stem cells can be modified to include BDNF and then placed into damaged parts of the brain. Such cells could not only survive better but might also repair broken brain circuits more efficiently by guiding other neurons to reconnect.
The study’s findings suggest that using cells equipped with BDNF could lead to more successful treatments for strokes, brain injuries, and neurodegenerative diseases. While the research is still in early stages and has only been tested in lab settings, the scientists believe that this strategy might one day be used to help real patients recover brain functions lost to disease or trauma.
The study findings were published in the peer reviewed journal: International Journal of Molecular Sciences
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s://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/26/15/7262
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