Hope for Spinal Cord Injuries
Laura Wong has coaxed damaged nerve cells to
grow and send messages to the brain again
Unlike tissues such as skin and bone, the
cells of the central nervous system in an adult are notoriously resistant to
healing. Illustration: Katelyn Comeau
“An ailment not to be treated,” read the prescription for a spinal cord injury
on an Egyptian papyrus in 1,700 B.C. Not much has changed in the intervening
millennia. Despite decades of research, modern medicine has made little headway
in its quest to reverse damage to the central nervous system.
That is not to say, however, that there isn’t a glimmer of hope. Laura Wong, an
M.D./Ph.D. student in Professor Eric Frank’s molecular physiology lab at the
Sackler School, has been able to coax damaged nerve cells known as sensory
neurons to regenerate, growing as much as 10 times longer than previously
documented.
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