Ga Tech Researchers Make Headway in Treating Spinal Cord Injuries

[Incoquad103006]

The cure is comming and so is my end of life on earth. Wich one will come first

[kenf]

"kinda frustrating...here we have the "new and improved" version but nobody is using the old original stuff" ... LMAO

[George78]

Originally Posted by Incoquad103006

The cure is comming and so is my end of life on earth. Wich one will come first

.. may I ask you how old are you??..

[GRAMMY]

Since the ""new and improved" version has been discovered, maybe they'd consider donating the old original formula to a SCI clinical trial rather than having veterinarians throwing it into the trash. It may save us from becoming dumpster divers.......

(one mans trash is another mans treasure)...

[Wise Young]

Originally Posted by George78

Dear Wise,
Thanks for the explanations. May be clinical trials are the real bottleneck, but we right here must all admit that we all be dead before we finished with clinicals trials and have a therapy available for us poor chronicals. As I previously said, I have been to an hospital in Washington DC in 1980 to be involved in a surgery consisting in autologous schwann cells graft into the spinal cord (Dr. Carl Kao). 30 years later where are we??.. May be we made a step forward in understanding the mechanisms of the injury, but we made a serious step backward too because it's harder than never for us to be involved in a surgery. To my point of view, the Establishment sentenced us to die in very bad conditions instead of giving us the right to do something before we die. That's a shame. I think the real bottleneck for us is to find places in the world where doctors can propose *today* something they believe hopeful and let us decide ourselves, with good advices, to go or not to go. What do you think?.. Concerning chondroitinase, do you know if there's a place in the wolrd where chondroitinase therapy is available for humans?..
Many thanks
George

George,

You are of course very welcome. I disagree with your suggestion that we need places were doctors can just "propose" hopeful or promising therapies and people can pay for them. That approach was what Carl Kao took and would doom us to continued repetition of the same mistakes over and over again with no progress. I consider Carl Kao to be a friend. I met him in 1979 when both of us were quite idealistic. He went the direction of being a loner who set up shop in Central America and offered what he though was the best and most promising therapies. Unfortunately, he was unable to convince anybody in the world that what he was doing was good for people. He did not do any clinical trials to prove that his therapies worked. As a consequence, he contributed little to the field. Over the 30 years, he may have operated on hundreds of people and put Schwann cells and other cells into the spinal cord, unwilling to admit that it does not work. So, today, Miami Project is once again planning to retest Schwann cell transplants to the spinal cord. By the way, this is the same criticism that I have of Hongyung Huang. He has now transplanted close to 1000 people with fetal olfactory ensheathing glia. None of these studies were controlled and he consequently has not been able to convince the world that these therapies are effective.

If we had doing clinical trials all along, ruling out therapies that do not work and finding evidence for therapies that do work over the last 30 years, we would be so much further ahead. I know that people want to have therapies. People have always wanted to have therapies. But the therapies are not available without substantial investment by companies to develop clinical grade therapies and to test the products to the extent that they can be safely applied to people. The doctors that are simply plugging cells into the spinal cord are limited because that is all that they can do. They don't have access to the science, the right cells, and the right combination therapies.

Take chondroitinase, for example. The enzyme did not last at body temperatures. When you put it into a pump at body temperature, the enzyme degraded. The only way that it worked in animal studies was to inject freshly made enzyme into the spinal cord. This requires repeated surgical exposures of the spinal cord. So, in many ways, the trials could not be carried out. Now, it appears (by the way, it is important that the work be replicated... because there is a lot of non-reproducible results in the field) that there is a better chondroitinase. The path for this to reach clinical trials is for other laboratories to have access to the enzyme to confirm the results. This may take a year or two. A company should become interested in this and invest in making clinical grade and gram quantities of the enzyme. Depending on how good the work is to date, this may take a year or two. Then, it should go to clinical trial. If we had clinical trial networks established, doctors would be able to put this directly into patients that already have pumps installed, instead of taking 2-3 years to start up a clinical trial from scratch, train everybody, and raise the money.

Please, to others on this tread who are suggesting that we should just inject this enzyme into people, this enzyme is not something that sits in a refrigerator somewhere. It must be manufactured for the clinical trials. One require only milligram quantities of the enzyme to treat rat. We need gram quantities to treat a human. Somebody must invest many millions of dollars to manufacture and purify large quantities of clinical grade enzymes that have the desired activity. This is not like going to the health food store, buying a couple of grams, and asking a doctor to inject it into your spinal cord.

Wise.