PEERING into rodents鈥� eyes may help scientists to strike back at conditions
like scrapie and mad cow disease.
Photoreceptor neurons in some mouse strains are destroyed by scrapie
infections. Moira Bruce of the University of Edinburgh says this offers
researchers a chance to quantify the effectiveness of drugs that might prevent
neuron death.
In NeuroReport, Bruce and her colleagues say that injecting basic
fibroblast growth factor into the retina can double the numbers of surviving
photoreceptors. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a first small step in the search for drugs that slow, or
even stop the neurodegeneration,鈥� she says.
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