CHICAGO - US RESEARCHES have engineered an enzyme that can gobble up scar tissue formed after spinal cord injuries, overcoming a key hurdle to getting injured nerves to reconnect and heal.

Spinal cord injuries trigger a cascade of events in the body that block the growth of nerve cells after a spinal cord injury.

'One of the major impediments has been this scar tissue that has formed,' said Ravi Bellamkonda, a biomedical engineering professor at Georgia Institute of Technology Research and at Emory University, whose study appears in Tuesday's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He said sugar proteins found near the scar tissue inhibit nerve fiber regeneration, and eliminating scar tissue is an essential step toward getting nerve fibres to grow back. Other teams have shown that delivering an enzyme from bacteria that digests scar tissue may help.

'The problem has been this enzyme is really sensitive and degrades very fast,' Mr Bellamkonda said in a telephone interview adding that the enzyme, chondroitinase ABC (chABC), is heat sensitive and must be repeatedly injected or infused into the body to work.

Mr Bellamkonda's team found a way to overcome both of those issues. They mixed the enzyme with a sugar called trehalose that made it stable at internal body temperature and instead of injecting the enzyme into the spinal cord, they put it into tiny hollow straws just twice the length of a single cell. They inject these at the injury site in a special gel that keeps the straws in place. -- REUTERS