As I approached the Kessler Institute on Tuesday I thought “is this the place that Christopher Reeve received rehabilitation?” Wow, now I am here to observe what he began for the disabled who have hope in the recovery process. . . even more amazing.

The NeuroRecovery Network (NRN) is set up in such a way that is inviting to those who go there. A very warm and motivated environment in which people who go there can feel “at home”. At home in the sense that they can work on themselves and know that all who surround them want the very best for them in their recovery process. A home in which there is a sense of peace while there is a nurturing environment in which to gain as much as possible while not being distracted. It is a team atmosphere that anyone who is striving for a positive common goal can work on in their own time without any pressure. Just do it and do it at one’s own pace.

This is how Michael's outlook is.. Michael (pictured) was injured in a skiing accident a couple of years ago. He has an incomplete C4 level of injury. He drives every day for 2 ½ hours each way from Pennsylvania. As I watched Michael using the “NRN” I sensed the strong determination and motivation. He was set up by his Kessler “team” on the harness while his legs were being moved on the treadmill. This movement is done for one hour with a break by the half hour. This was Michael’s 84th visit since April of 2010. Wow! What determination! He also has the support of his family and friends. We also met his Physical Therapist, Buffy, who has been with Michael since being at Kessler following the injury. Michael stated that “the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation with the help of Buffy are the driving forces that have brought him to this level of recovery”. Following the treadmill Michael proudly showed everyone how he can now stand on his own for about a minute at a time. He is also able to sit out of his wheelchair without falling from side to side. He has accomplished these two events in less than six months! In addition to this, he is also off of Baclofen which has been used for spasticity. This in itself is a miracle!

Overall, I am very impressed with the NeuroRecovery Network. It is one thing to read about this program or view it online. However, when one has the opportunity, as I did, to actually view it in person, one has a totally different outlook on the recovery process. This is the beginning of something greater within the recovery world. A piece of scientific research that participates in the big picture of hope. I am glad that I can share this experience with you. I hope that I have given more reason and inspiration to those and I hope that the dreams do come true one day.

Qualifications and more about the NRN are stated here.

Sonja
Assistant to Director
Quality of Life Grants

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The Reeve Foundation is disappointed by yesterday's ruling by a Washington DC District Court judge that yet again restricts the use of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Although the story has just begun to unfold, the Foundation is confident that it will be resolved favorably in a timely manner so that scientists are free to pursue the promise of both adult and embryonic stem cells.

Read more from the NY Times and Washington Post.

In this study, Aileen Anderson and colleagues used spinal cord injured NOD-scid mice to test the ability of transplanted human neural stem cells (hCNS-SCns) to "survive, differentiate, migrate, and promote improved locomotor recovery." Because NOD-scids lack a functioning immune system, the hCNS-SCns were not be rejected. The mice were transplanted at thirty days post injury, which the study authors define as "early chronic" injury - meaning that the spinal cord environment has become fairly stable and is no longer dynamically changing as it does in the acute and subacute stages immediately following injury. The preliminary findings are encouraging, suggesting that early chronic injury might well be amenable to hCNS-SCn transplantation to improve recovery without evidence of any transplant-related pain.

Dr. Anderson is Scientific Director of the Reeve Foundation's Animal Core Laboratory at UC Irvine and the Foundation provided partial underwriting for this research.

Read more about the study.

Learn more about research.

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The United States Department of Defense (DoD) awarded the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation a $5.4 million grant to support the expansion of translational research to find treatments for military men and women with spinal cord injuries.

The DoD gave the two-year, peer-reviewed grant to the Foundation's North American Clinical Trials Network (NACTN), an international network of hospitals led by Dr. Robert G. Grossman, chairman of neurosurgery at the Methodist Neurological Institute in Houston.

"Our goal is to bring effective treatments from the lab to the servicemen and women on our frontlines," said Grossman, NACTN's primary investigator. "With the support of DOD and the Reeve Foundation, our network can conduct more high-quality trials that we hope will result in viable therapies for spinal cord injury patients."

Read more.

Rob

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The Reeve Foundation invests significant research dollars into postdoctoral fellowships (through its Individual Research Grants program) and into postdoctoral training (through its International Research Consortium) because we appreciate the need to nurture the next generation of neuroscientists.

Spinal cord research is difficult and exacting and we believe the field will benefit enormously from well-trained, collaborative young scientists. Here we learn about a unique Canadian program that starts to nurture a love of science and an inquisitiveness about spinal cord injury during the high school years.

Pictured here are past Reeve grant recipient, Dr. Patrick Whelan, an associate professor in the faculties of medicine and veterinary medicine, and high school student  Natalie Farrell. Whelan is Farrell's supervisor on this unique summer job program at the University of Calgary.

Susan P. Howley
Executive Vice President, Research
Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation

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This is from the Miami Herald. Follow the link to watch the video. It's a good demo and nice reaction from a patient.

The day after her new breathing device was implanted, Ashley Hicks (pictured) did something astounding: she smelled the sweet scent of flowers in a hospital bouquet.

``I was speechless,'' she says now. ``I couldn't believe how much I missed that.''

Hicks, 21, had been unable to smell -- or taste -- anything for the nine years since she was shot in the neck during a drive-by attack at her Pompano Beach home.

Paralyzed and unable to breathe, she had been kept alive by a mechanical ventilator. But it pumped air into her lungs through a tracheostomy -- a hole in her neck -- bypassing her mouth and nose. And that meant she had no sense of taste or smell.

Read the rest and watch the video.

Find out more about SCI research.

Rob

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A new paper by Zhigang He and colleagues reports on the successful regrowth (sprouting and regeneration) of corticospinal tract (CST) axons following an animal model of spinal cord injury (SCI). CST axons are particularly important for functional recovery following SCI because they are responsible for voluntary movement. Previous research has demonstrated the ability of some types of axons to regenerate following injury, but long-distance CST regeneration has been elusive. In a series of experiments, He and his team recently discovered that a molecule called mTOR is a major regulator of growth and regeneration in optic (eye) nerves. mTOR itself is actually negatively regulated by Pten (that is, when Pten goes up, mTOR goes down), so Dr. He and colleagues deleted Pten to see if that would allow for increased levels of mTOR and possibly increased CST regeneration. Pten deletion did, in fact, result in CST sprouting, regeneration and new connections between nerve cells. The authors suggest that strategies to increase mTOR might promote successful regeneration following spinal cord injuries.

Douglas S. Landsman, Ph.D.
Director, Individual Research Grants Program
Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation

For additional perspective, please take a look at this article.

Today's New York Times reports on two novel and exciting approaches to regeneration that have potential clinical application. Both are in the early stages of exploration and use mouse, not human, cells.

A Stanford University team drove mouse muscle cells back to a younger state by turning off two genes that stop tumor growth; the younger cells were able to divide and help repair tissue. This is admittedly a high-wire balancing act that must be carefully done so as not to cause unchecked tumor growth. The genes are inactivated for a limited time after which their anti-tumor function is turned back on.

In the second approach, a UCSF group took run-of-the-mill mouse heart tissue cells (fibroblasts), treated them with three different proteins and turned them into heart muscle cells (the kind killed during a heart attack). In this case, there is no threat of tumor growth because the fibroblast-to-muscle conversion doesn't involve the stem cell stage at all.

Read about it here.

Susan P. Howley
Executive Vice President, Research

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This from the New York Times.

About four years ago, John Donoghue’s son, Jacob, then 18, took his father aside and declared, “Dad, I now understand what you do — you’re ‘The Matrix’!” Dr. Donoghue, 61, is a professor of engineering and neuroscience at Brown University, studying how human brain signals could combine with modern electronics to help paralyzed people gain greater control over their environments. He’s designed a machine, the BrainGate, that uses thought to move objects. We spoke for two hours in his Brown University offices in Providence, R.I., and then again by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows:

Q. WHAT EXACTLY IS BRAINGATE?

A. It’s a way for people who’ve been paralyzed by strokes, spinal cord injuries or A.L.S. to connect their brains to the outside world. The system uses a tiny sensor that’s been implanted into the part of a person’s brain that generates movement commands. This sensor picks up brain signals, transmits them to a plug attached to the person’s scalp. The signals then go to a computer which is programmed to translate them into simple actions. (Photo credit: Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times)

Learn more about BrainGate.


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A few months ago, Dr. Thomas Einhorn was treating a patient with a broken ankle that wouldn't heal, even with multiple surgeries. So he sought help from the man's own body.

Einhorn drew bone marrow from the man's pelvic bone with a needle, condensed it to about four teaspoons of rich red liquid, and injected that into his ankle.

Four months later the ankle was healed. Einhorn, chairman of orthopedic surgery at Boston University Medical Center, credits "adult" stem cells in the marrow injection. He tried it because of published research from France.

Einhorn's experience isn't a rigorous study. But it's an example of many innovative therapies doctors are studying with adult stem cells. Those are stem cells typically taken from bone marrow and blood — not embryos.

For all the emotional debate that began about a decade ago on allowing the use of embryonic stem cells, it's adult stem cells that are in human testing today. An extensive review of stem cell projects and interviews with two dozen experts reveal a wide range of potential treatments.

Read the rest here.

Learn more about stem cells.

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From The New York Times today:

The world’s first authorized test in people of a treatment derived from human embryonic stem cells has been cleared to begin by the Food and Drug Administration. The trial will test cells developed by Geron Corporation and the University of California, Irvine in patients with new spinal cord injuries.

Read the rest.

Read more about stem cells.

Rob

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In rodent models, the distance from a cervical spinal injury to the brain cortex is about 3 cm; in the rhesus monkey that distance is 10 cm and in humans it's 25 cm. Any treatment that is effective in a rodent model of spinal cord injury will need to travel longer distances in primates or humans to be effective.

In this study, Tuszynski and colleagues explored whether an effective rodent treatment (neurotrophic factors administered to the injury site to limit damage to the nerve cells and promote axon regeneration) would also work in primates - that is, would the regenerating axons traverse the longer distance.

Their findings show that the neurotrophic factors (also called growth factors) were effective in the primate, helping to reduce injury-related cellular degeneration and support regenerating axons.

Get more information about SCI research.

Douglas S. Landsman, Ph.D.
Director, Individual Research Grants Program
Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation

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A device that detects the subtle movements needed to sniff air through the nose or mouth can steer a wheelchair or allow completely paralyzed people to type messages, Israeli researchers reported Monday.

One patient wrote letters to her family for the first time since she had a stroke, while others used the device to surf the Internet or steer a wheelchair.

While no replacement for a true brain implant that would allow users to control devices with thoughts alone, the "sniff controller" works better for many patients than eyeblinks or other methods of communicating, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Indeed, sniffing allowed completely paralyzed locked-in participants to write text and quadriplegic participants to write text and drive an electric wheelchair," they wrote.

Read the rest.

A more in-depth explanation here.


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We are just 10 days away from the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. So what does 20 years of the ADA mean?

“Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.” Thus spoke President George H. W. Bush at the White House signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, July 26, 1990.

For people with disabilities, that wall -- symbolically and literally -- has come down. It hasn’t entirely disappeared but the ADA, reversing the centuries long history of “out of sight, out of mind” segregation of disabled people, has made a real difference in people’s lives.

It means so much more, too.

Learn more about the ADA at 20.

(Pictured: Standing from left to right are Rev. Harold Wilkie of Claremont, California and Sandra Parrino of the National Council on Disability. Seated from left to right are Evan Kemp, Chairman of the Equal Opportunity Commission, President George Bush, and Justin Dart of the Presidential Commission on Employment of People with Disabilities)

PS: Don't forget about commemorating this historic event with the Reeve Foundation!

On July 25, the Reeve Foundation will be at Dodger Stadium to set a Guinness World Record by having the most wheelchairs in a moving line.

Be part of history!

Janelle

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Scientists are beginning to understand what makes some stem cells safe for transplantation and some not so safe (e.g., they form tumors after transplantation). A recent study published in PNAS by Okano and colleagues shows that, in mice, certain induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) are not only safe for transplantation but also that they differentiated into neural-type cells and promoted functional improvement following spinal cord injury (SCI).

The authors suggest that these "safe" iPS cells may be a promising cell source for therapy following SCI.

Read the abstract of this study.

Read more about stem cells.

Douglas S. Landsman, Ph.D.
Director, Individual Research Grants Program
Reeve Foundation

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Photo courtesy of FreeFoto.com.