Newborns a hope for spinal injuries
It all started at a symposium five years ago. Catherine Gorrie, an expert in spinal cord injury, was listening to a presentation about the differences between the developing brains of children and the mature ones of adults when she had an “aah-haa” moment.
“I began to wonder if there is something in the spines of children that could be manipulated for repair,” says Dr Gorrie, a neuroscientist at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). It made sense. Dr Gorrie already knew that the more adaptable, or “plastic”, spinal cords of infants responded more efficiently to injury than did those of adults.
If she could tease out the factors that encouraged generic cells, so-called stem cells, in the spines of newborns to become new nerve cells, neurones, Dr Gorrie reasoned that it should be possible to mimic the process and help repair spinal cord injuries in people of all ages. That would be incredibly important because, to date, there is no cure for spinal cord injury and no proven drug treatment.
