Spinal Cord Injury News and Research

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A spinal cord injury usually begins with a sudden, traumatic blow to the spine that fractures or dislocates vertebrae. The damage begins at the moment of injury when displaced bone fragments, disc material, or ligaments bruise or tear into spinal cord tissue. Most injuries to the spinal cord don't completely sever it. Instead, an injury is more likely to cause fractures and compression of the vertebrae, which then crush and destroy the axons, extensions of nerve cells that carry signals up and down the spinal cord between the brain and the rest of the body. An injury to the spinal cord can damage a few, many, or almost all of these axons. Some injuries will allow almost complete recovery. Others will result in complete paralysis.

Can Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Reverse Spinal Cord Injuries?

Advances in tissue engineering offer hope for spinal cord injury repair, utilizing biomaterials, stem cells, and bioactive molecules to promote regeneration.

20 Mar 2025

Biomaterials to Regenerate the Nervous System: Carl Zeiss Foundation Sponsors InteReg Project at Mainz University

Collaborative project involving Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, and the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research will receive EUR 6 million.

11 Dec 2024

Novel Gene Regulates Axon Regeneration in the Central Nervous System

A scientific investigation led by researchers at HKUST has uncovered promising avenues for treating injuries to the central nervous system, with findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

23 Oct 2024

blotRig Tool Transforms Western Blot Design and Statistical Analysis for Reproducibility

Improving reproducibility in Western blot experiments through rigorous design and advanced statistical analysis is crucial for accurate protein quantification.

26 Sep 2024

Tabulae Paralytica: Mapping Cellular Dynamics in Spinal Cord Injuries

Scientists at EPFL have achieved a significant research milestone in the field of spinal cord injuries-;mapping out the cellular and molecular dynamics of paralysis in unprecedented detail with their open-source project 'Tabulae Paralytica'.

20 Jun 2024

Safer and More Effective Cell Therapy for Spinal Cord Injuries

For patients with spinal cord injuries, a small gadget developed by researchers at MIT and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology may help to increase the efficacy and safety of cell therapy treatments.

8 Feb 2024

Developing Regenerative Therapies to Treat Neurological Conditions

The primary cells that make up our brain and spinal cord, called neurons, are among the slowest to heal after injury, and many neurons never fully recover. Although research into neural regeneration has advanced, it is still unclear why certain neurons recover while others do not.

17 Oct 2023

UC San Diego Alpha Clinic awarded $8 million to bring new stem cell-based therapies to patients

Stem cells show particular promise in treating diseases for which few other effective treatments exist.

25 Nov 2022

Scientists discover latent stem cells that respond to injury in the central nervous system of mice

Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute have identified a group of latent stem cells that respond to injury in the central nervous system of mice. If a similar type of cell exists in humans, they could offer a new therapeutic approach to treat brain and spinal cord injuries.

23 Aug 2022

Research outlines how stem cells become sensory interneurons

In a first-of-its-kind blueprint, scientists have shown how stem cells mature into sensory interneurons, which are responsible for feelings including touch, pain, and itching.

22 Jul 2022

Research reveals that pain-blocking neurotransmitters offer long-term relief in mice

An international team of researchers found that a gene therapy that prevents targeted nerve cell signaling substantially lower neuropathic pain with no detectable side effects.

From UC San Diego 12 May 2022

Stringent lineage tracing crucial for studies of nerve cell regeneration

UT Southwestern stem cell scientists find that stringent lineage tracing is crucial for studies of nerve cell regeneration. Their results, which are published in Cell, show that this tracing is far from routine in the field and suggest that earlier studies reporting "striking" regeneration results must be reexamined.

30 Sep 2021

Metagenomic sequencing helps examine differences in the gut microbiome after injury

Researchers used metagenomic sequencing to identify variations in virus and bacterial populations that occur following spinal cord injury in mice.

13 May 2021

Researchers devise a small-molecule cocktail to protect stem cells from stress

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have devised a four-part small-molecule cocktail that can protect stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from stress and maintain normal stem cell structure and function.

4 May 2021

Neurod4 gene found to be the key factor in nerve regeneration after spinal cord injury

Nagoya University researchers have identified a gene that plays a crucial role in regenerating neurons of African clawed frog tadpoles, which has an unusually high capacity for nerve regeneration.

31 Mar 2021

New platform could help treat neurodegenerative diseases using regenerative medicine

Imagine if surgeons could transplant healthy neurons into patients living with neurodegenerative diseases or brain and spinal cord injuries.

24 Feb 2021

Innovative gene therapy approach for regeneration of functional new neurons

Spinal cord injury (SCI) often causes disability and seriously compromises quality of life. While decades of research have made significant progress in axonal regeneration after SCI, most of the interventions have not been translated into clinical therapies.

18 Dec 2020