This feels like something that should've been posted already. Assuming it hasn't, I'll go ahead and take the plunge. I happened upon an article in the guardian today, which, safe to say, blew my mind.
A recent medical discovery offers tangible hope for paralyzed individuals all over the globe. In a fairly simplistic procedure (as for as neuro-surgery goes), it is now possible to repair damaged and broken spinal cords by using a mix of nerve fibers and brain cells taken from the patients themselves as a type of splint. The spinal cord is thus encouraged to reknit itself.
Cool as this is, it sounds speculative. The very idea of making paralysis treatable sounds like science fiction. Well, in the article they detail how this procedure was succesfully used on a 38 year old man by the name of Darek Fydika, rendering him able to walk, and even drive a car, after years in a wheel-chair.
They believe this method to be viable to be put into mainstream use fairly soon.
Now, how cool is that? This could end up being the greatest medical advancement since the discovery of the Human Retrovirus HIV. What's more is that I don't believe many people, including many directly affected individuals, saw this cure looming on the horizon at all. Talk about a pleasant surprise, huh?
I've included the majority of the article below, and the link proper can be found here. There's also a video on the same page that I'd recommend you guys watch if you're interested. If not, you're a monster.
A man who was completely paralysed from the waist down can walk again after a British-funded surgical breakthrough which offers hope to millions of people who are disabled by spinal cord injuries.
Polish surgeons used nerve-supporting cells from the nose of Darek Fidyka, a Bulgarian man who was injured four years ago, to provide pathways along which the broken tissue was able to grow.
The 38-year-old, who is believed to be the first person in the world to recover from complete severing of the spinal nerves, can now walk with a frame and has been able to resume an independent life, even to the extent of driving a car, while sensation has returned to his lower limbs.
Professor Geoffrey Raisman, whose team at University College London’s institute of neurology discovered the technique, said: “We believe that this procedure is the breakthrough which, as it is further developed, will result in a historic change in the currently hopeless outlook for people disabled by spinal cord injury.”
The surgery was performed by a Polish team led by one of the world’s top spinal repair experts, Dr Pawel Tabakow, from Wroclaw Medical University, and involved transplanting olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) from the nose to the spinal cord.
OECs assist the repair of damaged nerves that transmit smell messages by opening up pathways for them to the olfactory bulbs in the forebrain.
Relocated to the spinal cord, they appear to enable the ends of severed nerve fibres to grow and join together – something that was previously thought to be impossible.
While some patients with partial spinal injury have made remarkable recoveries, a complete break is generally assumed to be unrepairable.
The research, funded by the Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation (NSIF) and the UK Stem Cell Foundation, features in a BBC Panorama programme on Tuesday night.
Raisman, who hopes to see at least three more patients treated in Poland over the next three to five years if the funding can be raised, said: “The patient is now able to move around the hips and on the left side he’s experienced considerable recovery of the leg muscles.
“He can get around with a walker and he’s been able to resume much of his original life, including driving a car. He’s not dancing, but he’s absolutely delighted,” said Raisman.
The NSIF’s founder, David Nicholls, whose son Daniel was paralysed in 2003, said information relating to the breakthrough will be made available to other researchers around the world to help cure paralysis.
He said: “Paralysis is something that most of us don’t know very much about, because we are not affected by it. One of the most devastating moments a parent will ever experience is the sight of their son or daughter lying motionless in bed and facing the reality that they may never walk again.
“The scientific information relating to this significant advancement will be made available to other researchers around the world so that together we can fight to finally find a cure for this condition which robs people of their lives.”
Raisman said he had never believed the “observed wisdom” that the central nervous system cannot regenerate damaged connections.
He added: “Nerve fibres are trying to regenerate all the time. But there are two problems – crash barriers, which are scars, and a great big hole in the road.
“In order for the nerve fibres to express that ability they’ve always had to repair themselves, first the scar has to be opened up, and then you have to provide a channel that will lead them where they need to go.”
He stressed that what had been achieved was a leap forward beyond promoting “plasticity” – the rewiring of remaining connections.
The professor added: “The number of patients who are completely paralysed is enormous. There are millions of them in the world.
“If we can convince the global neurosurgeon community that this works then it will develop very rapidly indeed.”
I know this is a video-game forum, but I expected people to be at least mildly interested in advances in medicine, especially considering it could considerably improve the quality of life of millions and millions of people. Would it help if I said that Vinny also retweeted the link after someone else sent it? Take this as my single, hopeful bump.
That's pretty amazing. The skeptic in me is thinking of all the amazing promising medical trials that pop up in the news all that time and that never seem to make the mainstream, and eventually fade from public memory. If this really is made available to the public at large "soon", it's one of the most meaningful medicinal advancements of the last century... or ever, really.
In either case, that formerly wheel-chair bound man that can now walk must be feeling like he's experiencing a miracle.
Hopefully this discovery pans out. Even if this is a cure for only a certain amount of people suffering from paralysis it would be a great step in enabling these people to have more fullfilling lives than they are able to live at the moment.
Driving his car again? Holy Baloney, this is more than a wiggle of the toe here. Amazing, if it is as good as it sounds hopefully it won't be long before this is a viable option for people.
Brilliant, absolutely inspiring and brilliant! I knew that the olfactory orbs had a distinct regenerative behavior, but I never would have imagined that it could be utilized in such a significant way. Happy thoughts!
@do_the_manta_ray Glad to see a fellow Complete 'B' Sides fan, that is, if it is a reference to the Pixies. It has to be, right?
@giantstalker: I believe it, I've read that a good 8 % of all affected by spinal cord injuries are men and women serving in the army. A staggering number considering the number of car accidents, etc, that occur every year. Man, it's almost if they built those contraptions to be dangerous. Seriously, though, my heart goes out to them. Nothing worse than being punished for trying to do something good.
@nardak, @snail: I hear you. The tendancy of these things is that somewhere, someone proclaims to have cured this and that and indicate some abstract piece of evidence that needs a fair share of clarifying. I've learned to be wary of these messages of hope, as in order to make them into a news article, they naturally have to be spun to seem like more than they are. That's where this piece stands out, to me at least, it's grounded, it's already been put into use successfully, and the folks working on it are already talking about implementing it large-scale. There's ofcourse a chance that it might not pan out, there always is, it may require certain apparatus that are far too expensive for any conventional, or even specialist, clinic, there may be difficulty in introducing it to surgeons over the world, etc. But overall, it's one of those rare cases that seem tangible. In a worst case scenario, it'll be a very big leap in the research for finding said eventual cure.
@poortommy: It absolutely is. We should be friends.
This has been a thing for a while now. The main struggle with this method was kinda alluded to at the end of that article and it's to do with making the scaffolding or 'clearing the path' for nerve regrowth. Our lab was trying to synthesise nanofibre scaffolding to house the nerve fibres. It's a pretty cool area of research except really really frustrating.
I guess this is a cool step forward though, someone may have finally figured out an easier way to do it. I've been out of the loop for a year or so now so this is the first time I've heard of it being done with great results.
PS as a side note, I don't think anyone in neuroscience has thought of nerves as being static for at least 20 years now. A bit of sensationalism on his part but completely understandable. It's the things you have to say to secure funding these days.
@do_the_manta_ray: If they can replicate the results this is amazing news. I think were long overdue for being able to record spinal damage. If only medicine was as lucrative a field as consumer electronics we would see these advances a lot faster.
What I'm wondering is, if and how the loose nerve ends don't short-circuit or connect to the wrong end. As it is now, a small collection of neurons in your brain can control an entire finger. If somehow [the fibers] were to shortcircuit or tied to the wrong ends, you'd issue commands to your thumb for example but ultimately twitch your pinkie or something equivalent. I kinda always thought medicine would find a way to use stem cells or do a simple end to end joining to conjoin the nerve fiber ends. But I never expected they'd use olfactory ensheathing cells to do this!
It is a scientific breakthrough indeed but it needs to be replicated. That's why I'm cautiously optimistic, doctors need to monitor that man carefully from now on.
Science is fucking great. Just read an article last week about advancements in optical implants that now allow blind people to see granted not in full color but they can at least see primitive shapes and light/dark with this implant.
@caska: I really appreciate the insight. I've read up a fair share on the subject, but I can't claim to have any insider knowledge. Be really cool if you could share a little bit more detail about it, either here or in a PM with me.
My dad works for a company that makes lifts so that people can get up near telephone poles, do construction, etc. An idiot field tech removed some kind of safety from one lift so that a 24 year old worker could go higher, but it fell over and paralyzed the guy inside it. My dad's mentioned it multiple times since hearing about it, I don't know if it just affected him deeply or what, but he'll be glad to hear about this and maybe that guy won't have to live his entire life in a wheelchair.
Amazing to think that one day I'll be telling one of my friend's grandkids (because I do not plan on having any of my own) that where I was when I heard about the treatment that cures paralysis was Giant BOMB dot com, a website! about video games!
Truly spectacular medical science. I hope it works in a large amount of cases and gets wide acceptance and practice in the medical field.
As someone who is studying neuroscience and is looking to get into medical school so I can be on the forefront of breakthroughs like this, thank you for posting this. It's stories like these that remind me that the sleepless nights may in the end be worth it.
@caska Yeah, most of my neuroscience professors spend a good chunk of lecture trying to demystify the sensationalist slant that neuroscience gets in most media.
I read this today and it was a really uplifting article. The fact that this procedure has been completed even once makes this an interesting development to me.
Interesting, but still useless to the present day general public. When this becomes widely available, then I'll acknowledge its importance. Until then, i put it somewhere in between a Mars rover and a bigfoot sighting.
@do_the_manta_ray: I've got a few things to write up tonight but I'll scrounge around a little and post some stuff here in the next couple of days! Personally I was working on how touch sensation was transmitted through the spinal cord so my background is a bit different but I'll see what I can do.
So I've done some reading up on this and these are my thoughts on it all.
The key thing that these guys did is their use of olfactory ensheathing cells (pretty much just cells in the brain close to the nose) to promote the dead nerves at the site of the spinal injury to actually start growing again. These cells have actually been used in a bunch of rat studies since 1998 that have shown improvements after spinal cord injury and are only just starting to go through trials in humans.
A similar experiment to what happened in this article was done last year by the same (or at least similar) group of people. What they did last year though differed in the fact that they didn't include any kind of vehicle or scaffold for the dead nerves to regrow through. They essentially just injected these crazy olfactory cells into the broken bit of the spinal cord to see what would happen [as an aside, this might sound easy but it's really really really hard, all surgeons really know what they're doing]. Turns out a little bit of regrowth occurred and lessened random muscle spasms and improved sensory transmission as well as a bit of motor control. In my reading of the paper I couldn't find anything fishy with their methods so everything's looking great so far. They have yet to publish a paper about this most recent experiment but it looks like they used other random nerves that no one needs to provide that 'scaffold' for nerve regeneration.
The only thing is there's not really any nerves that no one needs and it's still not the best environment...So that's where the search for the ultimate scaffold comes in.I just noticed that wikipedia calls it a 'nerve guidance conduit' which actually sounds a lot cooler. This is kinda where you realise that it's no perfect cure. Not yet. To get complete regrowth what we really want to do is stick these olfactory cells that promote nerve growth (neurotrophic factors) into a matrix that lets the nerve grow while blocking all the annoying other chemicals and enzymes and stuff that want to inhibit that growth.
If anyone wants to read up a little more on all of this then I've got a few links:
I might add that trails very similar to this have also failed in the past with extreme consequences and abnrola grows developing
Woman Grows A Nose On Her Spine After Stem Cell Experiment http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25859-stem-cell-treatment-causes-nasal-growth-in-womans-back.html#.VEl05SLF98E
...[in] the case of an 18-year-old woman who sustained a complete spinal cord injury at T10–11. Three years after injury, she remained paraplegic and underwent olfactory mucosal cell implantation at the site of injury. She developed back pain 8 years later, and imaging revealed an intramedullary spinal cord mass at the site of cell implantation, which required resection. Intraoperative findings revealed an expanded spinal cord with a multicystic mass containing large amounts of thick mucus-like material. Histological examination and immunohistochemical staining revealed that the mass was composed mostly of cysts lined by respiratory epithelium, submucosal glands with goblet cells, and intervening nerve twigs.
...[in] the case of an 18-year-old woman who sustained a complete spinal cord injury at T10–11. Three years after injury, she remained paraplegic and underwent olfactory mucosal cell implantation at the site of injury. She developed back pain 8 years later, and imaging revealed an intramedullary spinal cord mass at the site of cell implantation, which required resection. Intraoperative findings revealed an expanded spinal cord with a multicystic mass containing large amounts of thick mucus-like material. Histological examination and immunohistochemical staining revealed that the mass was composed mostly of cysts lined by respiratory epithelium, submucosal glands with goblet cells, and intervening nerve twigs.
Nobody wants nerve twigs....
I would not want to grow an extra nose so close to my butt.
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