Scientific Discovery - Right Up There with Penicillin!

Keeping with our Halloween theme, of all the chilling stories, none have had more of an impact than, Dr. Frankenstein and his reanimation feats.  Well, yesterday's horror story, may be today's discovery, for back in the day… a severed spinal cord was irreversible, period.  The common idea was that nerve cells just don’t grow back, so you’re done.  You might as well try to reanimate dead tissue rather than be able to re-grow nerve cells.  

Well, that’s quite not true, our bodies do that every day.  In short, nerve cells do grow back.  Just ask Neuroscientist Professor Geoffrey Rainsman at the UCL Institute of Neurology, whose work on olfactory ensheathing cells found in the nose, discovered that when nerve fibres that transmit smell get damaged, they get replaced

by new nerve fibres which re-enter the olfactory bulbs in the nasal cavity.  Hence, a reconstructive technique was born.

Frau Blücher, (horses whinnying..)

This technique, developed by researchers at University College London and put into practice by surgeons in the Polish city of Wroclaw, uses specialist human cells which repair damage to nasal nerves to enable spinal nerve fibres to re-grow and bridge a severed cord.

In the first procedure of its kind anywhere in the world, doctors implanted harvested cells - known as olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) - into an 8 mm gap in the spinal cord of Darek Fidyka, a Bulgarian who was confined to a wheelchair in 2010 after an attacker stabbed him in the back, slicing cleanly through his spine. His doctors had given him a less than one per cent chance of even the slightest recovery.

But doctors report today that the OEC implants on the two “stumps” of the cord slowly restored the nerve fibre connections between both sides of the injury, returning feeling and then movement to Darek’s legs. Some ten months after the surgery, the 40-year-old former part-time firefighter was able to walk with the aid of braces and a walking frame. He is now able to drive and live more independently.

Professor Geoffrey Rainsman

Professor Geoffrey Raisman, the head of UCL’s Institute of Neurology who conducted the groundbreaking research into OECs, told The Independent: “I believe this is the first time that a patient has been able to regenerate severed long spinal nerve fibres across an injury and resume movement and feeling.

“I believe we have now opened the door to a treatment of spinal cord injury which will get patients out of wheelchairs. Our goal is to develop this first procedure to a point where it can be rolled out as a worldwide general approach.”

The first signs that the technique was reaping rewards came six months later when Darek reported pain from a small pressure sore on his right hip - the first time he had felt sensation in his lower body since his attack.

Around the same time he began to feel tension being applied to his leg muscles during his post-operative physiotherapy and the impossible dream of so many paralysis sufferers - the recovery of sensation and movement - began to seem real.

Within 19 months of the operation, Darek was able to tell the direction of movement of his feet in tests with up to 85 per cent accuracy and could discriminate between the movement of his toes and his whole foot.

Recounting the moment he found he could once more feel his lower body, Darek told a BBC Panorama documentary due to be screened tonight: “When it starts coming back, you feel as if you start living your life again, as if you are born again.”

The results of the procedure are reported today in the specialist medical journal, Cell Transplantation.

Both the medical teams and independent experts underlined that the new technique has so far only been applied to a single patient and its near-miraculous effects need to be repeated with a larger group. They added that the mechanism by which the OECs repair nerve connections must also be better understood.

This information is being made available to researchers around the world so that together we can fight to finally find a cure for this condition which robs people of their lives.”

Source(s):

• http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/british-doctors-on-brink-of-cure-for-paralysis-9807010.html

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

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