The Reeve Foundation is pleased to highlight publication of  the NACTN/AOSpine Focus Issue on Spinal Cord Injury,  which is a special supplement to the September issue of the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine. 

The supplement represents a collaboration between the Reeve Foundation's North American Clinical Trials Network (NACTN) and AOSpine North America, a foundation focused on research and education related to spinal conditions, including traumatic spinal cord injury.  The online version of the supplement is available without cost to the public.

With a handful of spinal cord clinical trials underway in North America and Europe and more to come in the next few years, there is an urgent need to pave the way for accelerated progress in the development of effective treatments for spinal cord injury (SCI) and facilitate human testing. NACTN, created in 2004 by the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, brings together a consortium of university hospital neurosurgical and neurorehabilitation teams to bring promising therapies out of the laboratory and into clinical trials by facilitating educational exchanges and clinical collaboration among a global network of scientists.

NACTN’s lead investigator, Robert G. Grossman, MD (Methodist Hospital, Houston), explains that given the complexity of SCI and the exorbitant cost of mounting clinical trials, “there can be no progress without partnerships, without collaborations, without alliance-building.  Spinal cord injury is too difficult and too expensive to go-it-alone and there is no room for failure due to ill-conceived planning or lack of cutting-edge spinal cord expertise.” 

NACTN is supported by the Reeve Foundation and the Department of Defense, U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.

Read the press release from Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine.

Read the full text in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine.

Learn more about NACTN and what this publication means.