New Research May "Cure" Spinal Cord Injuries!

Nearly 300,000 Americans live with a spinal cord injury. Less than 3% of persons with a complete spine injury recover basic physical function. Surgeons do their best to stabilize the spine and repair damage around the spinal cord. But there's nothing doctors can do right now to directly promote healing of the spinal cord.

"A lot of the time the damage is done and, sometimes, despite a great surgery and a scan that looks good, the patient doesn't have any improvement. It's a very frustrating thing as a surgeon to see that we do everything we can but we still have patients who can be vent-dependent, paralyzed, loss of bladder and bowel."

At the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, a new injectable therapy was discover to restore motion in laboratory mice and could pave the way for the healing of paralyzed people with spinal injuries. Severe spinal cord injuries are incurable today in humans, but this therapy, involving liquid nanofibers that gel around a damaged spinal cord like a soothing blanket, produces chemical signals to promote healing and reduces scarring.

Researchers found that "in about four weeks effectively, somewhere between three and four weeks after injection of the therapy, the paralysis was completely reversed and the mice are able to walk almost normally." And, if effective in humans, the nanofiber therapy could restore movement to a person paralyzed by a spinal cord injury.

Read the details of the research here.