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One gift, many benefits
This research is inspired and
supported by an individual
donor, but it holds potential
promise for thousands of others.
Spinal cord injury is costly,
devastating and, currently,
essentially untreatable.
About 265,000 people in the
United States are living with
its effects, with about 12,000
new patients each year. It
affects primarily males who
average 40 years old. They face
reduced life expectancy and
immense continuing medical
costs. Only a third of patients
ever successfully resume
employment, with just 11 percent
working one year after injury.
n anonymous donor has provided $4 million
to support the Spinal Cord Injury Repair Program
in developing two novel approaches in restoring
nerve communication using microelectronics and
cellular regeneration.
“To be able to stand up would be a major change
in quality of life for many patients,” said Randolph
J. Nudo, Ph.D., director of the Landon Center on
Aging and one of the program’s lead researchers.
“We want to go beyond that, but one step at a time.”
The donor, a quadriplegic following a spinal cord
injury several years ago, approached KU with a
desire to fund neuroscience research that might lead
to restored function after chronic spinal cord injury.
Smith and colleagues identified five potential projects
based on expertise in KU’s Institute for Neurological
Discoveries (IND) and relevance to the donor. They
narrowed the list to the two that provided the best
chances for improvement.
Peter G. Smith, Ph.D., director of the IND and
the Spinal Cord Injury Repair Program, said the
project brings researchers from basic science disciplines
such as physiology, anatomy and pharmacology
together with clinicians
in neurosurgery, neurology,
rehabilitation medicine and
more. “This is not just about
KU,” Smith said. “We’ve
brought in key collaborators
at K-State, Case Western
Reserve University, Harvard
University and the University
of Washington. This is
about building the best possible
research teams to solve
a very complicated problem.”
The brain-spinal cord
interface approach, led by
Nudo, uses microelectronics
to provide an artificial
communication link from
the brain to the spinal cord, a pathway that is severed
in spinal cord injury. The regeneration strategy, led by
Smith, is to discover a way to place new cells in the
spinal cord that can replace damaged pathways.
“Together, these short- and long-term fixes provide
the greatest hope for individuals with spinal cord
injuries,” Smith said. The early phases of the work
must be performed in animals in order to perfect
techniques and develop rigorous measurements to
determine if therapies are working. The challenge
now, for Nudo’s team, is mapping brain and spinal
cord areas to connect; for Smith’s team, it’s engineering
the proper cells to replace injured spinal cord cells.
Answers on the head of a pin
The next time you curse your cell phone, think twice:
The same technology might hold the key to preserving
motion after spinal cord injuries.
Nudo has previously focused on developing therapies
for stroke using neural prosthetics to bypass
damaged areas of the brain. This project brings that
approach to spinal cord injury.
When the neural pathways that connect brain to
limbs are severed, several structures remain intact: the
parts of the brain creating signals, the neurons below
the injury in the spinal cord that relay signals, and the
muscles that would receive the signals. Therefore, a
patient could retain basic motor function if implanted
electrodes could record the brain’s electrical signals
and send them past the damaged area, where they
could activate an external limb, stimulate a muscle
directly or stimulate neurons in the spinal cord.
“Our work is trying to put those two things
together,” Nudo said, “so someone literally would
think about moving a limb, using the same neurons
as before, and trigger the movement.”
Implantable devices must be very small. Ten years
ago, Nudo said, the technologies he’s using would
have required an entire rack of computers. With
microelectronics advances, his team can borrow from
resources like cell phone technology.
10 KU GIVING | SUMMER 2012