Study shows that potential advancement could mark “paradigm shift” for SCI treatment
Researchers from Houston Methodist Hospital and the University of Cambridge may have made a major advance in the search for more effective treatments for spinal cord injury (SCI). They recently announced a study of a device that wraps around the spinal cord without penetrating neural tissue and reads the signals traveling along it — a first step toward routing those signals around an injury. The new technology, essentially a flexible, ultrathin circumferential electrode array that conforms to the spinal cord, was shown to decode sensory, motor, and autonomic signals in rats and pigs.
The study, published in Nature Communications, was co-led by Damiano Barone, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Houston Methodist, and George Malliaras, the Prince Professor of Technology in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.
“Most current technologies aim to improve whatever function remains after a spinal cord injury. Our goal is different,” Barone said in a news release. “Rather than fixing the injury itself, we want to bypass it entirely and create an alternative route for signals to travel.”
In rats recorded while moving freely for up to three days, the array decoded the intent to move by reading low-frequency rhythms in the spinal cord and identified eight types of sensory signals with 94% accuracy. Because a single device can interpret multiple simultaneous signals related to sensation, movement and internal body functions, it may one day be possible for one implant to help restore several functions lost after SCI.
Preclinical studies also showed that the technology distinguished signals from internal organs. Additional testing in pigs demonstrated that the approach works in larger anatomical structures, an important step toward future clinical translation. The work builds on the team’s earlier feasibility studies in human cadavers.
More than 2.5 million people worldwide live with spinal cord injuries, and this research could lead to next-generation neuroprosthetic implants that provide a direct link to the nervous system, transmitting signals around an injury to restore lost sensory, motor, and autonomic functions.
“This could mark a paradigm shift in how we think about spinal cord injuries,” Malliaras said. “Instead of starting with the idea that what is lost is gone forever, this approach asks whether we can restore function by rerouting the signal around the injury.”
Next, the team plans to test whether the device can restore function in laboratory models of chronic spinal cord injury before moving toward human clinical trials. Other collaborators on the study included Salim El Hadwe, Ruben Serrano, George Psaltakis, Margaux Forner, Chaeyeon Lee, Sydney Swedick, Moleca Ghnnam, Tawfique Hasan, and Alejandro Carnicer-Lombarte from the University of Cambridge, as well as Anton Banta and Xueer Zhang from Houston Methodist.
