Rebuilding the Brain

Our current treatments for neurological diseases and injuries tend to be crude and ineffective. Many drugs cannot get inside the brain to do their work, and sometimes the best we can do to heal brain or spine injuries is nudge along the body’s own repair mechanisms. Biomaterials engineer Sarah Heilshorn is working on a new way to fix neurons that don’t heal on their own: She has created designer proteins that might help stem cells, which generate all the body’s tissues, get into the nervous system, where they could possibly replace or heal cells. Heilshorn describes her innovations below.