Latest Neurobiology Stories

Drugs may act like bad electrician, messing up wiring in brain and nervous system Alzheimer's disease drugs now being tested in clinical trials may have potentially adverse side effects, according to new Northwestern Medicine research. A study with mice suggests the drugs could act like a bad electrician, causing neurons to be miswired and interfering with their ability to send messages to the brain. The findings, from the scientist whose original research led to the drug development,...

ROCKVILLE, Md., Feb. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Neuralstem, Inc. (NYSE Amex: CUR) announced today that it has closed on its previously announced registered direct placement of 5,200,000 shares of common stock at a price of $1.00 per share, and 5,200,000 warrants each with an exercise price of $1.02 per share and exercisable starting six months from the issuance date for a term of five years. The company received aggregate gross proceeds of $5,200,000, which will be used for general...

Team apply new procedure to rapidly induce nerve regeneration in mammals American scientists believe a new procedure to repair severed nerves could result in patients recovering in days or weeks, rather than months or years. The team used a cellular mechanism similar to that used by many invertebrates to repair damage to nerve axons. Their results are published today in the Journal of Neuroscience Research. "We have developed a procedure which can repair severed nerves within minutes so...

Fruit flies don't have noses, but a huge part of their brains is dedicated to processing smells. Flies probably rely on the sense of smell more than any other sense for essential activities such as finding mates and avoiding danger.  UW-Madison researchers have discovered that a gene called distal-less is critical to the fly's ability to receive, process and respond to smells. As reported in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists also...

The blood-brain barrier is essential for maintaining the brain's stable environment—preventing entry of harmful viruses and bacteria and isolating the brain's specific hormonal and neurotransmitter activity from that in the rest of the body. In addition to nerve cells, the brain contains glia cells that support and protect the neurons. In the fruit fly, the blood-brain boundary is made by glia joined into an envelope sealed around the nerve cells. As the brain rapidly expands during...

For years, researchers seeking new therapies for traumatic brain injury have been tantalized by the results of animal experiments with stem cells. In numerous studies, stem cell implantation has substantially improved brain function in experimental animals with brain trauma. But just how these improvements occur has remained a mystery. Now, an important part of this puzzle has been pieced together by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. In experiments with...

Meaningful Recovery Achieved in 87 Percent of Patients with Peripheral Nerve Injury SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 12, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In the first-ever multicenter clinical trial on processed nerve allograft, researchers from The Buncke Clinic in San Francisco found that treatment of severed peripheral nerve with processed nerve allograft showed meaningful recovery in 87 percent of patients, comparing favorably to traditional nerve repair (autograft nerve). The study...

Quite early in its development, the mammalian brain has all the raw materials on hand to forge complex neural networks. But forming the connections that make these intricate networks so exquisitely functional is a process that occurs one synapse at a time. An important question for neuroscience has been: how exactly do stable synapses form? How do nerve cells of particular types know which of their cortical neighbors to "synapse" with, and which to leave out of their emerging networks?...

ROCKVILLE, Md., Dec. 27, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Neuralstem, Inc. (NYSE Amex: CUR) announced that it has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to advance to Phase Ib in its ongoing clinical trial to test its novel neuroregenerative compound, NSI-189, for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD). Phase Ib will test the safety and tolerability of the drug in depressed patients. NSI-189 is a proprietary new chemical entity discovered by Neuralstem that...

An inhibitory drug reverses seizure damage to neurologic pathways in rats About half of newborns who have seizures go on to have long-term intellectual and memory deficits and cognitive disorders such as autism, but why this occurs has been unknown. In the December 14 Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at Children's Hospital Boston detail how early-life seizures disrupt normal brain development, and show in a rat model that it might be possible to reverse this pathology by giving certain...