Date: 1 July 2025 A remarkable little mammal with a superpower for healing could hold the key to helping people recover from brain injuries. Scientists are studying this small mammal’s rare ability to regenerate brain tissue, hoping it could lead to breakthroughs in treating human brain injuries. iStock: tenra Key statistics Every 4 minutes, someone in Australia is hospitalised with a head injury. In Australia, head injuries make up 21% of injury emergency department visits, 25% of injury hospitalisations, and 17% of injury deaths. The spiny mouse is unlike any other mammal – if injured, it can naturally regenerate its hair follicles, nerves, muscles, cartilage and – most importantly for Professor Mary Tolcos and her team – brain tissue. Through their ARC Discovery project, they are investigating how the spiny mouse’s remarkable healing powers could one day help humans recover from brain injuries. In Australia alone, more than 700,000 people have brain injuries. This means they with impairments ranging from memory loss and mood changes to cognitive and motor decline. ‘Given the severity of the issue, we're really hoping to find the secret ingredient, or ingredients, that facilitate brain repair.’ Professor Tolcos’ own interest in this area began after an extended family member suffered from brain damage. While rehabilitation may help people re-learn some skills after an injury, the human brain doesn’t regenerate lost tissue. Instead, it scars – often leaving permanent impairments. ‘We want to find out how the spiny mouse, a mammal like the human, is able to repopulate the injury site with neurons and regrow axons across the injury without a glial scar,’ Professor Tolcos says. ‘If we can find the pathways, the molecular factors, the genes or whatever it might be, can we then harness that information and apply it to human brain injuries?’ The Discovery project is a collaboration between RMIT University and Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France. Professor Tolcos’s team extracts the cell types from the brain they think are responsible for the repair mechanism and sends this genetic material to France. There, the French collaborators develop what is called an ‘interactome’, the complete set of molecular interactions between those cells. Professor Mary Tolcos (right) pictured with collaborators Dr Bobbi Fleiss (centre) and Professor David Walker (left), who first established the spiny mouse colony in Melbourne, and the only one in the Southern Hemisphere. ‘It’s in the early stages so we don’t have any breakthroughs yet, but we do have our focuses,’ Professor Tolcos says. ‘As in all research, we’ll be guided by the data.’ Professor Tolcos credits ARC funding, including her earlier Future Fellowship, for enabling this kind of ‘blue sky’ research, that has allowed her to expand her lab, mentor PhD students and build a global research network.