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Scientific Commentary |
Ready for human spinal cord repair?
Spinal Cord Injury Centre, Balgrist University Hospital,
Forchstr. 340
8008 Zürich,
Switzerland
E-mail: volker.dietz@balgrist.ch
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We are in an exciting time where, based on successfully established animal models, a partial repair of the damaged human CNS appears to be feasible. A paper in the present issue of Brain (Mackay-Sim et al., 2008
) deals with the outcome after transplantation of olfactory ensheathing cells (OEC) in subjects with chronic spinal cord injury. An earlier report described the surgical and safety procedures in this trial (Feron et al., 2005).
Presently, rehabilitation of spinal cord injury is limited to exploiting neuronal plasticity by functional training (Dietz, 2002). The combination of functional training and regenerative therapies, even if only limited structural repair is achieved, would certainly make an improved impact on outcome. There is an impressive number of promising approaches for inducing
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