SAHMRI and the Royal Adelaide Hospital‘s spinal unit have been given the green light for a new clinical trial.
The project, spearheaded by Australian football veteran Neil Sachse’s Neil Sachse Foundation and now run by South Australia’s Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI), began with the creation of a new isotope that can be injected into the arms of spinal injury patients.
“This will change the whole concept of how people are treated from here on in because they’ll be able to see the spinal cord injury in 3D,” Sachse told ABC News.
Ryan O’Hare Doig, the head of spinal cord injury research at SAHMRI, said the world-first clinical trial would use a PET-CT scan to show where the isotype was sticking to cells that were still living.
“It’s a PET-CT, or positron emission tomography study, which involves injecting a radioisotope into our patients and our isotope sticks to a protein or our target,” Dr O’Hare Doig told the ABC.
“Then we hope that their spinal cord will light up at the site of their injury and will allow us to predict their neurological function and look at their recovery over time.”
Dr Doig is one of the 6 researchers who was given a grant from SpinalCure this year thanks Peter Blundy’s generous bequest, to purchase a Rodent Horizontal Ladder for his experiments. Read the full list of recipients here.
Source: ABC News
Read the full story here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-09/spinal-cord-injury-clinical-trial-to-begin-in-adelaide/11776890