First clinical trial of chronic spinal cord injury treated with a single drug

Abstract

Department of Clinical Research Center, Hangzhou First People's Hospital, Hangzhou 310006, China *Correspondence: wangying@hmc.edu.cn Received: August 24, 2023; Accepted: September 12, 2023; Published Online: September 13, 2023; https://doi.org/10.59717/j.xinn-med.2023.100029 © 2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Citation: Lu K. and Wang Y. (2023). First clinical trial of chronic spinal cord injury treated with a single drug. The Innovation Medicine 1(2), 100029. CALLING FOR NEW THERAPY, THE SPINAL CORD INJURY Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) is a devastating neurological condition that can lead to physical paralysis, psychological stress, and financial burden. SCI is not only a health condition that severely affects the quality of life of patients and their families, but also has important socioeconomic implications, so there is an urgent need to improve the clinical management of patients with SCI. SCI can result in nerve disconnection and persistent neurological deficits, so restoring the neural network through axonal growth is an important strategy to achieve significant neurological recovery. Electrical stimulation therapy, cell therapy, stem cell transplantation, and the use of exoskeleton robots have all been attempted to treat SCI. However, clinical trials of these therapies in patients have not yet provided reproducible evidence of clinical efficacy. Although many targeted preclinical drugs have been evaluated in clinical trials, but few have been made into clinical practice. SCI may remain a challenging condition, there have been no trails using drugs to improve nerve repair after SCI. Excitingly, in the last few days, Stephen M Strittmatter team published in The Lancet Neurology a landmark randomized trial for the first time that demonstrated that a drug can promote nerve repair in chronic SCI. This research may be a breakthrough, indicating drug treatment for SCI is no longer out of reach.