This research story really opens a brand new window on how the spinal cord works, or doesn’t work. A team led by Frank Bradke at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology has found a way to see inside a living cord. It’s a “a leap forward in regeneration research,” says the Institute. Read More

One of the most compelling spinal cord research stories of the past year centers on an enzyme called chondroitinase. Its primary target is chronic SCI – that in itself is big news since most SCI science has been about acute care and almost never about long-term injuries. Read More

A couple of interesting research papers were published in the medical literature this week.

The first is from the lab of Zhigang He, of Harvard: “Sustained Axon Regeneration Induced by Co-deletion of PTEN and SOCS3.”  The article was published in Nature on-line last month but the print version came out Wednesday. Read More

Last month we looked at a three-way combination treatment for spinal cord injury that formed a sort of detour around the injury site.

The group that performed that set of experiments has just published more combo-treatment results, this time adding the enzyme chondroitinase (ChABC, which degrades certain types of spinal cord scarring) along with NT-3 (a growth and survival factor, a sort of biological Miracle Gro) and NR2D expression (a way to genetically engineer the area of injury to activate a molecule related to growth and plasticity of axons). Read More