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By Gigi Bloomfield
Could A Rat Teach You to Walk Again?

Spinal cord paralysis can have profound effects on someone's life, however this previously irreversible injury may become healable in the near future. This could all become possible with the use of an implant that gets surgically inserted at the injury on the spinal cord. The implant was designed by scientist Grégoire Courtine, professor of neuroprosthetics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.

While this new piece of technology has not had substantial testing on humans, it has been tested on rats for over 15 years. The rats that were tested were paralyzed at the beginning and after proper training and stimulation, they were able to walk again. A tiny implant was put just below the spinal cord injury. When the implant is being used it stimulates the nerves that were damaged by the injury. After just two months of repeated training and stimulation, the rats were able to walk again. This was made possible because the stimulation of the nerve caused the nerve fibers to regrow and reconnect to the rest of the nervous system, therefore allowing the brain to properly send messages to the legs and spine. With this connection regained the rats were able to walk normally again. Used to assist the training was a harness to help the rat stabilize. A similar large scale version of this harness is being used in the first tests on humans. According to Gregoire Courtine the harness,” holds them like a parent would hold a young child to take his first steps”.

The implant is installed through a surgery. It is put on the surface of the lumbar spinal cord located in the lower back. Grégoire Courtine is not the only one trying to fight this battle. Scientist Stéphanie Lacour is designing an implant that goes on the spinal cord that is made out of a flexible material inspired after the fiber that covers the brain and spinal cord. This implant is not quite ready for clinical testing, but sometime soon it could create a huge impact on those facing paralysis every day.

With the leading cause of spinal paralysis being automotive crashes, this injury affects a vast number of people. In the future, after the finalization of this technology, it could change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people internationally. The next steps of making this a reliable and safe treatment would be more testing on people in clinical trials. If all goes well, in the future spinal paralysis will be reversible.













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