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Source: https://news.yahoo.com/injectable-gel-reversed-paralysis-mice-165207056.html
This Injectable Gel Reversed Paralysis in Mice. Humans Could Be Next.
Neel V. Patel
Fri, November 12, 2021, 11:52 AM·2 min read
Paralysis might one day be as easy to cure as a single injection of a drug, if some promising new results stand up to scrutiny. Scientists at Northwestern University reversed paralysis in mice with spinal cord injuries by injecting them with a self-assembling gel that can repair tissues.
We don’t yet know if the findings, published in the journal Science, will translate over to humans. But for the nearly 1.5 million people in the U.S. living with paralysis caused by spinal cord injuries, the study provides a glimmer of hope, especially for a condition that less than 3 percent of people fully recover from.
“Currently, there are no therapeutics that trigger spinal cord regeneration,” Northwestern's Samuel I. Stupp, who led the study, said in a statement. “Our body's central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord, does not have any significant capacity to repair itself after injury or after the onset of a degenerative disease.” Experimental treatments like stem cells or gene therapy have never yielded very good results.
The new gel is designed to act as a kind of scaffolding for cells in the spinal cord and make it easier for them to grow. It’s made of individual protein units that are able to automatically bind together into long chains in water. Within the body, a network of these chains can mimic the extracellular matrix of the spinal cord to give cells a structure on which to grow...
This Injectable Gel Reversed Paralysis in Mice. Humans Could Be Next.
Neel V. Patel
Fri, November 12, 2021, 11:52 AM·2 min read
Paralysis might one day be as easy to cure as a single injection of a drug, if some promising new results stand up to scrutiny. Scientists at Northwestern University reversed paralysis in mice with spinal cord injuries by injecting them with a self-assembling gel that can repair tissues.
We don’t yet know if the findings, published in the journal Science, will translate over to humans. But for the nearly 1.5 million people in the U.S. living with paralysis caused by spinal cord injuries, the study provides a glimmer of hope, especially for a condition that less than 3 percent of people fully recover from.
“Currently, there are no therapeutics that trigger spinal cord regeneration,” Northwestern's Samuel I. Stupp, who led the study, said in a statement. “Our body's central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord, does not have any significant capacity to repair itself after injury or after the onset of a degenerative disease.” Experimental treatments like stem cells or gene therapy have never yielded very good results.
The new gel is designed to act as a kind of scaffolding for cells in the spinal cord and make it easier for them to grow. It’s made of individual protein units that are able to automatically bind together into long chains in water. Within the body, a network of these chains can mimic the extracellular matrix of the spinal cord to give cells a structure on which to grow...