Exosomes Promote Remarkable Recovery in Stroke

It’s been almost a quarter century since the first drug was approved for stroke. But what’s even more striking is that only a single drug remains approved today. In an open-access article published on December 6, 2019, in Translational Stroke Research, animal scientists, funded by the NIH, present brain-imaging data for a new stroke treatment that supported full recovery in swine, modeled with the same pattern of neurodegeneration as seen in humans with severe stroke. The open-access article is titled “Neural Stem Cell Extracellular Vesicles Disrupt Midline Shift Predictive Outcomes in Porcine Ischemic Stroke Model. “It was eye-opening and unexpected that you would see such a benefit after having had such a severe stroke,” said Steven Stice, PhD, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and D.W. Brooks Distinguished Professor in the University of Georgia’s (UGA’s) College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Dr. Stice is also Chief Science Officer for ArunA Biomedical Inc., and, prior to joining UGA, he was the co-founder of Advanced Cell Technology and served as both CSO and CEO of that company. “Perhaps the most formidable discovery was that one could recover and do so well after the exosome treatment.” Dr. Stice and his colleagues at UGA’s Regenerative Bioscience Center (RBC) report the first observational evidence during a midline shift—when the brain is being pushed to one side— to suggest that a minimally invasive and non-operative exosome treatment can now influence the repair and damage that follow a severe stroke. Exosomes are considered to be powerful mediators of long-distance cell-to-cell communication that can change the behavior of tumor and neighboring cells. The results of the study echo findings from other recent RBC studies using the same licensed exosome technology.