An experiment with paralysed laboratory rats has given new hope to sufferers of spinal injury. The rodents regained the ability to walk after receiving treatment involving chemical and electrical stimulation. The tests, conducted by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), gave rats with badly damaged spinal cords the ability to walk and even run up stairs. With the aid of electrodes and chemicals to stimulate nerves and create motion in the legs, the rats were held upright in a vertical harness and lured into forward motion with Swiss chocolate. Professor Gregoire Courtine, the lead researcher, said: “This is the World Cup of neurorehabilitation. Our rats have become athletes when just weeks before they were completely paralysed.”
Spinal cord injuries often have devastating and permanent consequences in humans. The worst can cause total loss of nerve function and paralysis along the spinal pathway. Until recently such injuries were irreversible, but in 2009 medical research using rats demonstrated the potential for regenerating severed nerve cells and coaxing them into re-forming connections broken by the injury. Last year, a man in Oregon regained the ability to move his legs after an electrical stimulator was implanted. The breakthrough by EPFL has demonstrated the possibility of “100% recuperation”, with the brain able to regain entire control over previously paralysed limbs.
Advertisement
Courtine hopes that experiments using the new research will begin on human patients in Zurich within “a year or two”. Dr Elizabeth Bradbury, an expert on spinal injury at King’s College London, said: “This is ground-breaking research and offers great hope for the future of restoring function to spinal-injured patients.” Mark Bacon, of Spinal Research, said: “In the past it was seen as folly to think we might be able to restore function and I think that’s no longer the case.” If the treatment proves successful, it will come too late to help Christopher Reeve, the Superman actor paralysed by a horse riding accident who died in 2004. He said of the broken nerves in his spinal cord: “The cables are in place — they’re just waiting for the phone man to come and connect them.”
Some in the scientific community remain sceptical over the importance of this breakthrough. Dan Burden, of the Spinal Injuries Association, said: “The neurology of rats is considerably different from our own and we should recognise that we are still a long way off from anything resembling a cure.” There is also uncertainty over whether the treatment would be suitable where nerve tissue had been damaged for a long time. Dr Jan Gawronski, of the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital, described the study as “yet another example of research that would lead nowhere”, adding that scientists had been using rats for neuroregeneration studies for decades and “not one had led to a breakthrough for patients”.