We are thrilled to announce, in partnership with Forward Ability Support, the awarding of the inaugural Forward Fellowship — a prestigious three-year appointment designed to fast-track bold, high-impact research into spinal cord injury.
Following a national search and a rigorous review by our Scientific Advisory Panel, we identified an exceptional early-to-mid career researcher with a deeply original and innovative research vision: Dr Laura Grice at the University of Queensland.
Mapping the unknown — a new project to create a ‘Google Maps’ of the spinal cord
With a background in genetics and computational biology, a typical day sees Dr. Laura Grice coding in front of a computer, sifting through data that may hold the answer to a cure for spinal cord injuries.
“I’ll be coding and it feels a bit like solving a puzzle. You’re trying to get the pieces together, and you might come up with a new idea for how to visualise the data or to see something new that you couldn’t before – that’s very rewarding,” she says.
“This data is so big that you don’t really know what it says until you come up with a way to visualise it. But then what’s really nice is the collaboration, whether that’s working together with our small team in the lab meeting or when I have the chance to meet Duncan Wallace and the SpinalCure team. It makes me step back and remind myself why I do this work.”
When Dr. Grice looks at a spinal cord injury, she doesn’t just see damaged tissue, she sees complex cellular interactions that hold the keys to recovery.
“We’re creating a bit of a Google Maps of exactly what’s happening in the spinal cord after injury,” explains Dr. Grice. “We can see which cells are where, what they’re doing, and how they’re working together.”
The lab Dr. Grice is part of uses cutting-edge technologies to study spinal cord injuries in painstaking detail. Single cell RNA sequencing reveals what each individual cell is doing, while spatial transcriptomics maps exactly where cells are located within the injury.
This combination creates a comprehensive picture of the complex immune response after injury, and the team is working to identify exactly which cells are causing harmful inflammation — which exacerbates the severity of the damage — and which cells are promoting healing.
Personalised medicine for every unique injury
Dr. Grice’s research recognises no two spinal cord injuries are identical. There are significant differences between injuries at different spinal levels, with high-level injuries showing completely different scarring patterns than lower ones.
“There’s such a big difference between injuries at different locations”,” notes Dr. Grice. “We need to understand these differences to develop targeted treatments for each type of injury.”
Understanding these differences is transforming how we approach our search for treatment. By identifying which immune cells promote healing and which cause harmful inflammation, the ultimate goal is for researchers to develop precisely targeted therapies.
Dr. Grice envisions a promising future where treatments are tailored to each patient’s specific injury. Her mapping project is creating the foundation for this personalised medicine approach by documenting exactly how injuries at different spinal levels respond.
“Ultimately every spinal cord injury is different, and so we’re not going to be able to just have a single, one size fits all approach to this,” Dr. Grice explains. “We need to start incorporating injury level as a consideration into our experiments more routinely. We need to understand this so we can design our interventions more smartly, more tailored to what we’re actually seeing in the cord.”