In the lab, rats with severe spinal cord injury are learning to walk—and run—again. Last June in the journalScience, Grégoire Courtine, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), reported that rats in hislab are not only voluntarily initiating a walking gait, but they were sprinting, climbing up stairs, and avoidingobstacles after a couple of weeks of neurorehabilitation with a combination of a robotic harness and electricalchemicalstimulation.
Now, at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) inBoston, Courtine describes this research in detail and the next steps towards clinical trials to be done in Switzerland.Courtine holds the International Paraplegic Foundation (IRP) Chair in Spinal Cord Repair at EPFL. At AAAS,in a symposium titled, “Engineering the Nervous System: Solutions to Restore Sight, Hearing, and Mobility,” heoutlines the range of neuroprosthetic technologies developed in his lab, which aim to restore voluntary controlof locomotion after severe spinal cord injury. He explains how he and his colleagues are interfacing the centralnervous system with stretchable spinal electrode arrays controlled with smart stimulation algorithms – combinedwith novel robotic rehabilitation – and shows videos of completely paralyzed rats voluntarily movingafter only weeks of treatment.
Courtine expects to begin clinical trials in human patients within the next two years. At AAAS, he presents the 9 million euro European project NeuWalk (www.neuwalk.com), an effort dedicated to the transfer of technologyfrom rats over to humans with spinal cord damage through development of effective neuroprostheticsystems for rehabilitation. The first phase of clinical studies will be conducted at the Lausanne UniversityHospital (CHUV), which has developed extensive expertise in the electrical-chemical stimulation of the humanspinal cord. The second phase will take place at the newly planned EPFL Valais Wallis academic clusterin Valais, Switzerland, to be inaugurated in 2015. This health and biotechnology center in Valais will focus onnew treatments and rehabilitation for people with physical disabilities. This research program has the potentialto develop effective treatment paradigms for rehabilitating individuals with severe spinal cord injury, for whomcurrent rehabilitative treatments do not restore the ability to stand or walk.