Grant: CIHR New Investigator

Spinal cord injuries result in devastating paralysis, often in young, otherwise healthy individuals. A great deal of scientific research into spinal cord repair/regeneration has been conducted over the past 30 years, offering much hope to individuals with this catastrophic injury. Despite this, all therapies which have shown great promise in animal models of spinal cord injury have failed to demonstrate benefit in human clinical trials. Hence, there are no treatments currently available to reverse the paralysis of spinal cord injury. When the spinal cord is injured, an inflammatory reaction is triggered. This inflammatory response is thought to contribute to further damage. In this research project, we will investigate the inflammatory response to spinal cord injury in human patients by sampling their spinal fluid and measuring proteins that regulate inflammation. We will correlate these inflammatory proteins with the severity of paralysis and the behavioral/functional recovery of these patients. This will establish a method of classifying patients according to biological, rather than functional criteria. We will then test whether these proteins are influenced by a drug called minocycline, which is currently being tested in patients with acute spinal cord injuries. This will help us identify biological methods of measuring treatment response. Establishing biomarkers of injury severity and treatment response will be extremely valuable in facilitating clinical trials of new SCI treatments, and will potentially speed up the process of validating new therapies for this devastating injury. Also, by revealing new information on the human inflammatory response to injury, we will identify important aspects of the acute pathophysiology of spinal cord injuries that may be important targets for new treatments.