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MotivatedtoSucceed

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Hello all,

I came across an article from the Toronto Star (http://www.healthzone.ca/health/articlePrint/995374), which a Toronto-based study found the gel-like substance was helping coat the injured nerves and reversing the neurological damage.

Has anyone came across this in their research? Could this be used for ALS?

The article is below:

Drug helps reverse paralysis after spine injuries, Toronto study suggests

May 23, 2011
Joseph Hall

Health Reporter

Just before they closed the incision after a six-hour operation to repair his shattered spine, surgeons at the Toronto Western Hospital asked John Picco’s parents if they could try something new.

The 17-year-old roofer had tumbled two days earlier through an opening on top of an Oshawa supermarket after removing his safety line to free himself from a snag.

He fell to the floor beneath, crushing the L1 vertebra in his lower back — a catastrophic injury that left him completely paralyzed from the waist down.

But with the new treatment along his wounded spine, the gel-like drug Cethrin was coating his injured nerves in a protective layer that was actually reversing the neurological damage.

“Oh jeez, yes I’m glad I got it,” says Picco, now 23, who has defied early predictions that he’d never move his legs again.

Picco can now shuffle almost 20 metres with the aid of braces and can leg press 45 kilograms in the gym.

And in a new study released this month, researchers at the Western’s Krembil Neuroscience Centre show the drug has likely produced significant movement regeneration in several of its 48 patients.

Most recent spine injury research has concentrated on drugs that attempt to block the inflammatory response caused by the original trauma, which continues to destroy nerve cells in the hours after an accident.

But Cethrin is the first drug tested on humans that actually appears to heal the damaged neurons, which carry electrical movement impulses from the brain to the rest of the body.

“There have been very few clinical trials done with reparative or regenerative therapies in humans, very few,” says Dr. Michael Fehlings, the Krembil centre’s director.

“And this is also one of the few that has really shown promise,” says Fehlings, the study’s lead author.

It did so, he says, despite the total paralysis suffered by all of the study’s subjects below their injury sites.

“There is no movement or feeling below the level of the injury, so someone is literally completely paralyzed,” Fehlings says.

“The prognosis for such patients is generally quite sobering in terms of neurological recovery,” he says.

As a small, early phase trial, the researcher’s key goals were to establish the drug’s safety and to determine the doses that might produce optimal results.

But it appeared to show the results produced by those optimal doses were profound, Fehlings says.

“In that group of patients we observed a rate of recovery which was astonishing,” he says.

Fehlings says 31 per cent of the optimally dosed patient group improved two to three grades on a standard paralysis scale, moving from complete paralysis to a place where they could both feel and move below the injury.

He says the study’s mobility improvement rates in those who responded best to the drug were more than three times greater than could be expected to occur normally.

Fehlings says the drug, which is slathered along the spinal cord at surgery’s end, likely blocks the actions of a protein known as Rho, which limits the ability of nerve cells, or axons, in the cord to regenerate and reconnect.

Fehlings cautions that the drug must be tested in much larger, more rigorous trials before it can be put into general clinical use. But he says it has excited the neurological community enough already that those new studies should be quick in coming.

The research, published this month in the Journal of Neurotrauma, comes hard on the heels of a study released last week that detailed the recovery of a paralyzed college baseball player through the use of electrical stimulation to the spine.

Fehlings says the Cethrin treatments would almost certainly work in conjunction with such electrical therapy, making patients’ spinal cords more receptive to the stimulation.

Picco himself credits a combination of Cethrin and relentless rehab work with his continuing recovery.

“I’d like to believe it’s both hard work and the drug,” he says.

“But it’s slowly still coming back and it’s not stopping,” he says.
 
No it wouldn't work for ALS. It's a substance put on the acutly injured spinal cord during surgery. You couldn't cut open every area of an ALS sufferer and coat the injured nerves

It's very exciting research though. Thanks so much for a great read.

Aly
 
It would be great if they could inject something like this through the skin and into motor pathways. If it's a gel substance, I guess the needle would have to be pretty thick!
 
Agree with Aly -- damage to the spinal cord from ALS is too diffused along the spinal cord for this treatment to be practical. A bit of quick G o o g l i n g on the mechanism by which Cethrin is claimed to work turns up some work being done with related compounds in cell cultures, SOD1 mice, etc., but nothing appears to be ready for clinical trials yet.
 
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