|
| |
DR. DOUGLAS H. SMITH
The article
Stretching the Limits to Heal Spinal Cords said
For years,
scientists have been trying to make injured spinal cords grow back, with
limited success.
Lying awake in bed one night, neurobiologist Douglas H. Smith came up
with an offbeat alternative:
Instead of trying to regrow the damaged nerves, how about taking nerve
cells from elsewhere in the body and getting them to stretch? After all,
he reasoned, a similar process must be going on when whales and giraffes
grow their spinal cords to tremendous lengths.
So far, it's working. Smith and his University of Pennsylvania colleagues
have taken clumps of nonessential nerve-cell bodies from rats, stretched
them very slowly — a millimeter or two a day, in specially
constructed
stretching boxes — and successfully implanted them into other rats
with
injured spinal cords.
Douglas H. Smith, M.D. is a
Professor of Neurosurgery at the
University of
Pennsylvania's School
of Medicine and the Director of the
Center for Brain Injury and Repair
(CBIR). He has devoted his full-time efforts in the study of
neurotrauma, following completion of fellowships in both molecular
biology and neural trauma at the
University of Connecticut. His current
research encompasses single cell to whole brain response to traumatic
mechanical deformation. His research interests have included mechanisms
of nerve trauma and repair, magnetic resonance techniques for diagnosis
of diffuse
axonal injury, traumatic brain injury and cognitive
dysfunction, and the link between brain trauma and neurodegenerative
diseases. These efforts have resulted in over a hundred published
reports.
Doug is coauthor of
Extreme Stretch Growth of Integrated Axons in
The Journal of Neuroscience,
Acute treatment with MgSO4 attenuates long-term hippocampal tissue
loss
after brain trauma in the rat in Journal of
Neuroscience Research,
Traumatic axonal injury induces proteolytic cleavage of the voltage-gated
sodium channels modulated by tetrodotoxin and protease inhibitors
in
The Journal of Neuroscience,
Traumatic axonal injury induces calcium influx modulated by
tetrodotoxin-sensitive sodium channels in
The Journal of Neuroscience, and
Neurogenesis and glial proliferation persist for at least one year in
the subventricular zone following brain trauma in rats in
Journal of Neurotrauma. Read
his full publications list!
Learn
about the Smith Neurotrauma Lab!
Read
his entertaining article
Is the roller coaster G force threat all spin?
Print bio!
| |
|
