Grant: Project Grant

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a leading cause of permanent disabilities affecting over 2.5 million individuals worldwide. In Canada, there are over 86,000 individuals living with devastating consequences of SCI with approximately 4,200 new cases each year. The lifetime medical cost of each SCI patient is estimated at 1.6 to 3 million dollars. Thus, SCI has a profound impact on patients, their caregivers, and the healthcare system. Currently, there is no effective treatment for SCI and new regenerative therapies are needed to allow neurological improvement in patients. Research by our group and others show that neural stem cell therapy offers tremendous potential for SCI repair. In fact, neural stem cell transplantation has moved to clinical trials in recent years. Initial outcomes of these trials indicate that while stem cells are safe for SCI patients, their benefit for improving disabilities is only modest. One major challenge is that these stem cell grafts cannot survive long enough in the spinal cord to generate new tissue. This limitation is mainly due to the toxic environment of injury that rejects these cells even with the use of immune suppressant drugs. Hence, it is essential to understand why stem cells die after transplantation and develop new treatments to increase their potential for repairing SCI. To this end, we have discovered new treatments with the potential to potentiate the effects of neural stem cells for repairing the injured spinal cord. This project will evaluate the efficacy and safety of this experimental treatment. If shown to be effective in our experimental model, we hope that in near future this treatment would be tested in ongoing clinical trials to optimize the outcomes of stem cell therapies for SCI patients and aid in improving recovery of function and quality of life in these individuals.