Recent advancements in molecular biology are made to expect the appearance of the new treatment of
stroke patients. One is the administration of
neurotrophic factors, and another is the use of neural stem cell. In this report, we performed two experiments. First experiment is administration of
glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (
GDNF) using an adenovirus vector into ischemic rat brain. A replication-defective adenoviral vector containing
GDNF gene (Ad-
GDNF) was directly injected into the cerebral cortex at 1 day before 90 min of transient
middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) in rats.
Infarct volume of the Ad-
GDNF injected group at 24 h after the transient MCAO was significantly smaller than that of vehicle or Ad-LacZ treated group. These results suggest that the successful exogenous
GDNF gene transfer ameliorates the ischemic
brain injury after transient MCAO in association with the reduction of apoptotic signals. Second one is the neural stem cell activation after transient
ischemia. We investigated a possible expression of highly polysialylated
neural cell adhesion molecule (
PSA-NCAM) in gerbil hippocampus after 5 min of transient global
ischemia in association to the proliferation of neural stem cell labeled with
bromodeoxyuridine (
BrdU). The number of
PSA-NCAM positive cells increased in dentate gyrus (DG)
at 10 and 20 days, and that of
BrdU-labeled cells increased in DG at 5 and 10 days after the reperfusion. Immunofluorescence for
PSA-NCAM and
BrdU showed that a few cells per section were double labeled in DG only
at 10 days after the reperfusion. These results suggest different chronological change of
PSA-NCAM positive and
BrdU-labeled cells in DG after transient
ischemia.