Possibility of molecular therapy for degenerated disc diseases

Abstract

Low back pain and associated spinal disorders are formidable problem. Although disc degeneration is believed to be one of the major causes of low back pain, patho-mechanisms are still unknown. Biological approaches to regenerating these pathological discs started by using proteins so called growth factors. To overcome relative short duration of growth factors effects, transfer the genes encoding these growth factors to the disc cells was developed. Furthermore, cell therapy is recently reported using, for example, "stem cells". Within gene therapy fields, developments were attempted to use non-viral vectors and the RNA interference technique to continuously down regulate the harmful genes for normal physiology of the discs, so that we can expect more prophylactic effect such as delay the process of disc degeneration or regenerating disc in a long periods.