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Melitta Schachner: My name is Melitta Schachner and my research is on adhesion molecules,
that's the overall designation of the molecules I work with, and they are fascinating molecules
in the sense that they make cells recognize each other, enforce their relationship, or
not enforce their relationships during androgenetic development and that is embryonic development.
It is fascinating also that they play important roles in the adult nervous system that is
under pressure to regenerate. Mammals can do that to quite some extent, but we've become
very interested in an animal that is better in regeneration than us humans, namely fish,
zebrafish, and the zebrafish is very interesting in the sense that it can regenerate completely
after you cut the spinal cord. You have an adult zebrafish, let's say, that big, you
cut the spinal cord, and then within 6 weeks after the injury, swims as happily as before,
and as we say, as a fish in water. Now, how can we learn from zebrafish to apply that
to mouse and men? These molecules, you put into an injured mouse and low and behold,
many of the molecules identified to be beneficial in zebrafish, applied to in that respect not
intelligent mouse, it regenerates better. So, this is the first step towards going to
the human, right? And the application in human therapy, and the application of the molecule,
we'd like to reduce them to their essential smaller parts, and those we are reducing again
to even smaller molecules. The next step in my research is to see which type of beneficial
molecules we could put together in a combinatory approach to make spinal cord regeneration
better. We very much hope for companies to get interested in our compounds and have them
patented such that they can license them and make them available. The older I get, the
more I want to see that my fellow persons, right, it sounds a little bombastic that mankind
doesn't suffer so much in terms of nervous system disease. This really drives me on,
having come from really basic science. Dedicated basic scientists have suddenly learned that
that molecules we're working with are not only good in embryonic development to make
a healthy nervous system, that these molecules play important roles in the adult. I'd like
to say that whatever is good for the spinal cord in mammalian regeneration is beneficial
for other parts of the brain that get hard, for instance in stroke, Parkinson's, Huntington's,
Alzheimer's, there's many more nervous system disease which all have to be cured with good
molecules and good cells.
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