Any hope for future therapies on Neural Regeneration/Brain Injury Repair?

Submitted by 94746382926 t3_105i3rh in singularity

I suffered a brain injury a couple years ago and this has obviously made life very difficult. I feel like a shell of my former self and unfortunately don't know if I will ever be capable of achieving the things I wanted to in life and building the sort of life I was on track to have before this.

The promise of potential AGI and future medicines are one of the main things I turn to for hope these days. This sub is a big part of that.

That being said, I really feel most days that I will likely grow old and die far before we understand the brain well enough to repair damage. Is there anything on the horizon in the next few decades I can look towards? I know no one knows for sure but I hope that if AGI is achieved during my lifetime (I'm 27), that will enable us to manipulate biology on a deep enough level to make this possible.

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ttystikk t1_j3b1hkf wrote

This is one of the most challenging areas of medicine and I hope to see breakthroughs in my lifetime.

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PhilosophusFuturum t1_j3b7uqe wrote

In a few of his presentation; Dr. Sinclair noted some neuroregeneration in his Yamanaka reprogramming research. Plus; we can expect an explosion of connectome research this decade, and we will likely have a full mouse connectome by 2030. The Human Connectome is the holy grail of neuroscience, and we could have that feasibly by 2050.

Nothing in the immediate future though. Everything I mentioned is two decades off at least.

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94746382926 OP t1_j3b9fw6 wrote

That's good to hear but also kind of a bummer. But it's to be expected though I guess. Shit ain't easy and even two or 3 decades would be a crazy achievement.

Personally I'm hoping ISRIB which is being licensed to Calico will work and be a nice stopgap measure if not a complete cure. Seems very promising although it's still in animal trials as far as I know.

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PhilosophusFuturum t1_j3b9w8c wrote

Don’t get your hopes up about animal trials. Only about 3% of medicines go from passing animal trials to doctor’s desktop. And that’s probably a high number.

I do believe that technological process is indeed accelerating quite a lot. We need to reform our institutions to be able to integrate progress into society. If we do that with our medical institutions we could see actual cures for so many disorders released way sooner.

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94746382926 OP t1_j3bcbik wrote

Yeah ik translation rates are pretty low. Didn't realize it was that low though lol.

Now that I think about it ISRIB may be in phase 1 now but not sure how that's going.

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mattsowa t1_j3dhvj5 wrote

Sorry to say, but OP don't listen to people guesstimating the years of breakthroughs. It has been shown time and time again such guesstimates were often very wrong throughout history.

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Ok_Atmosphere_72 t1_j3b0jhj wrote

I am in a somewhat similar situation. In your case cell therapy might be a promising approach, maybe in the mid 2030s it will become viable.

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Shelfrock77 t1_j3bantm wrote

I honestly think it’ll be late 2020s. I’m fairly healthy and young so i’m not thinking biased. Brainchips are going through a revolution right now. It wouldn’t surprise me if AI is able to make fast progress enough to arrive in the late 2020s. I’m a firm believer that we will have minduploading by 2030 along with fdvr. I see no good reason why fdvr and minduploading would be more than a year apart, if so, that is bad planning by the gov cause that would cause wide scale paranoia.

“How can the gov afford to give us fdvr but not minduploading? They must be hiding something ?” It’s only a matter of time before people start becoming sus questioning why it’s been 2 or more years of having fdvr but no minduploading. If you believe Klauss Schwab, you will own nothing and be happy no matter who you are.

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Relative_Purple3952 t1_j3c270z wrote

The hopium is really strong in this one. We are barely scratching the surface in neuroscience and no AGI will just magically alter physics to give us better access to a messy, chaotic wet mass of flesh of our brain.

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Derpgeek t1_j3c3ty0 wrote

In the meantime you may want to check out cerebrolysin as well as mushrooms (preferably psychedelic but lions mane is also good for the brain and is legal and easy to find). You should also try a ketogenic diet and exercise more to reduce inflammation as much as possible. These things together may not put you back at your previous baseline depending on how bad the damage is, but it’s likely the best you’ll be able to do pre singularity.

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BoltzmannBrain1 t1_j3eeavn wrote

I feel qualified to comment on this. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this topic and considered starting a company in this space because it is absolutely underexplored and there are things that we can do with today’s technology that would benefit us all greatly. Look up cortical organoids. If your injury is cortical (likely is), there is a LOT of hope in the near future. If it’s subcortical, that’s quite a bit more difficult. The cortex is a general computing substrate of which you have a limited supply. The neocortex is responsible for our general intelligence and the fact that blind people can recruit their visual cortex for other things like hearing. If you have excess, it can generally be put to good use. The idea here is simple: graft lab grown neocortex onto your own (grown from your own induced pluripotent stem cells). This has already been done in primates but nobody seems to be exploring it in humans. It may have been blocked by Congress or something. The real kicker is that while it can certainly be used to repair damaged brains, it can also be used to augment healthy brains as well (hence my fascination). Don’t give up hope! Happy to talk if you want to DM me.

The way people are using these things now (and the company I wanted to start) is by hooking them up to a neural interface and teaching them to do various tasks, much like a wetware biological computer. The manufacturing process is reduced to cellular biology, and you can grow gigantic supercomputers using this method. Pretty awesome stuff.

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TheDavidMichaels t1_j3c4bbo wrote

AGI does not seem to be the issue when it come to this kind of research. likely there is a fix already know just not being applied. Solely because some power believe that improving and extending human life will contribute to over population and are actively campaign to depopulated the earth. Everyone is looking at AI for good. is that really going to be how it used? AGI in the hands of corporations and governments along will lead to u not see 40 if them commie get there way.

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tivohax t1_j3cmhba wrote

Annovis bio has some truly interesting results for all types of neurodegeneration.

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technofuture8 t1_j3g2ngx wrote

Hey OP ever heard of exosomes? I need information from you so answer this question, are you rich enough to afford a $20,000 stem cell treatment for which you would have to travel to Mexico for?

Umbilical mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can regenerate the body, these are mesenchymal stem cells that are harvested from a fresh healthy umbilical cord. You know who Mel Gibson is? Joe Rogan interviewed Mel Gibson back in 2018 because Mel Gibson flew his dying father down to Panama where it's legal to get injected with umbilical cord MSCs. Here just watch this. This is just the first 10 minutes of the interview the whole thing is on Spotify because Joe Rogan moved his show over there. https://youtu.be/uUCJo1j0S9s

So what are exosomes, stem cells secrete exosomes, it's the exosomes that signal the body to heal itself. In fact every cell in your body is secreting exosomes into the bloodstream, it's one of the ways cells use to communicate with each other. Scientific American did an excellent job on explaining what exosomes are check it out? https://www.scientificamerican.com/custom-media/nature-outlook-extracellular-rna/inside-the-stem-cell-pharmaceutical-factory/

If you're hurting on money then it's cheaper to get exosomes and you can get exosomes here in the USA. I'm talking about exosomes that are collected from mesenchymal stem cells. I know of a company in the USA that sells very high quality exosomes.

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greentea387 t1_j3he808 wrote

Hey, I also suffered brain damage. I agree with what the others answered, but I would like to add that it is very helpful to really get deep into the topic and figure out the exact mechanism that is causing your problem. Like, what are the neural mechanisms underlying brain damage-induced functional deficits? What exact molecular challenges need to be overcome in order to restore function? Why is it currently not possible?

I find that addressing questions like these in as much detail as possible can provide much better insight into the nature of the problem and help you assess the impact of upcoming research. Like when you read something in the news saying "brain damage is now curable (study x has found y)" then you are in a much better position to discern what that actually means for your condition.

I recommend the book "Principles of Neural Science". It's expensive but there are always ways to get the PDF for free :)

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