Natural Healing

Many of our best medical treatments are based on boosting the body’s natural capacity for recovery. So understanding the in-built responses activated during hard-to-treat conditions might point towards new approaches. Hypoxic-ischaemic brain injury is a common cause of disability in newborns that comes from a temporary block of the blood supply to the brain, and current treatments are limited to cooling babies down. Now researchers have investigated the role of lactate – produced by muscles during hard exercise when oxygen levels are low. They found that mice lacking a receptor that lactate binds to barely recovered any brain tissue following the injury, but those with the receptor enlisted the restorative action of immune cells (green in the recovering section pictured) and cell cycle to spark new brain cell growth (pink) and partly repopulate the damaged areas. Harnessing this mechanism could provide a route to improving prospects for babies with hypoxic-ischaemic brain injury.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Lauritz Kennedy and Emilie R Glesaaen, and colleagues
• Department of Microbiology, Oslo University Hospital and University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, August 2022