While talking about human intelligence in general, one thing that is often shoved under the rug is our natural tendency to be imperfect. As unsettling as it sounds, we still don’t have a sizeable clue about many major things, which seemingly concern our lives in a somewhat personal manner. Nevertheless, it’s not all doom and gloom. The things we are in touch with today were not known to humans at all just a few decades ago, and that does a lot to inform us about the correctness of our path. This progression has been influenced by a ton of factors, but if we have to pick the biggest of them all, it will be technology without any question whatsoever. Even though bringing technology into the world’s fabric was an achievement in itself, the fact that it ended up becoming our segway into even better things really altered the trajectory we were initially on. With a creation of such brilliance, the world was able to facilitate a host of important findings across different disciplines. Now, these tech-centric findings surely made all the right noises in every stratosphere they were sent to, however, their biggest piece of validation was found to be bubbling up in the medical sector. Our limitations when it comes to curing certain medical issues are well-known, so for technology to solve those issues rather efficiently was beyond impressive. In fact, the leaps towards better healthcare have been coming in spades, and the latest one is, by all means, a big one.
The researching team at Northwestern University of Illinois has successfully developed an injectable therapeutic, which is essentially purposed around regenerating a damaged spinal tissue. Made up from synthetic peptide sequences, the material is supposed to boost interaction between peptides and target receptors within the neural tissue, therefore putting the tissue in a better position to recover. On a granular level, however, there are a lot of things happening to achieve the said purpose. For instance, the treatment promotes spinal repair by shrinking the scar tissue, stimulating axon and myelin reconstruction, bolstering overall neuronal survival rate, and allowing blood vessels to grow at the required pace..
According to the details shared so far, the team has tested this technique on mice with spinal cord injuries and concrete symptoms of partial paralysis. In just four weeks, the mice had regained the ability to walk.
“The central nervous system tissues we have successfully regenerated in the injured spinal cord are similar to those in the brain affected by stroke and neurodegenerative diseases, such as ALS, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Beyond that, our fundamental discovery about controlling the motion of molecular assemblies to enhance cell signaling could be applied universally across biomedical targets,” said Samuel Stupp, a member of the researching team.
Encouraged by the preliminary results, the team is now seeking FDA clearance to take the therapy closer to human beings.
