The Reeve Foundation is building alliances to bridge the gap between lab discoveries and successful clinical translations.
These groundbreaking partnerships represent the future of spinal cord injury research. Please check back regularly to learn about new partners and initiatives designed to accelerate treatments.
The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation and International Spinal Research Trust (ISRT) are jointly supporting four research studies designed to restore neural/motor function primarily through novel circuit formation in chronic, traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI). The grants are the first for the Reeve-ISRT collaborative alliance, established in 2021 to focus on fast-tracking SCI therapies using combinatorial interventions, innovative protocols and broad stakeholder engagement.
Our research-driven equity partnership with ONWARD, a Netherlands-based medical technology company, is already yielding results with the potential to change what is possible for people living with spinal cord injury. Among ONWARD’s breakthrough technologies is the delivery of individualized transcutaneous stimulation to the spinal cord in combination with intensive rehabilitation to improve arm and hand recovery. Another exciting program uses targeted, programmed epidural stimulation of the spinal cord to restore movement and other functions. ONWARD’s technology has the potential to one day enable people with even the most severe forms of spinal cord injury to walk, stand, and more again.
Axonis is a start-up company with a mission to marry basic science into translational medicine and spawn a new generation of therapeutics for patients with SCI. Research efforts are underway to target a protein called KCC2 to develop a new oral drug for people with SCI that could help restore function while also reducing pain and spasticity – aspects of SCI that have been largely unaddressed by other treatment approaches.
The North American Clinical Trials Network (NACTN) works to bring promising therapies out of the laboratory and into clinical trials, in a manner that provides strong evidence of effectiveness and safety. By uniting experts across the country, NACTN is gathering valid, meaningful data to speed the delivery of new therapies to the community. NACTN supports a network of clinical centers as well as clinical coordinating, data management and pharmacology sites, all dedicated to establishing best practices in the care and treatment of spinal cord injury. In addition to translating discoveries from the lab into clinical studies, NACTN maintains a patient registry of information that is important to the design and testing of possible new treatments for SCI.
The Reeve Foundation and the University of Alberta have partnered on a joint three-year initiative, supported by a $250,000 Reeve Foundation grant, to accelerate open data via the Open Data Commons for Spinal Cord Injury (ODC-SCI). The initiative aims to facilitate data standardization, knowledge sharing and scientific replicability and translation to spur more pre-competitive therapeutic research opportunities and reduce fundamental challenges within the research community that slow progress.
Mass General Brigham is establishing the Implantable Brain-Computer Interface Collaborative Community (iBCI-CC). This is the first Collaborative Community in the clinical neurosciences that has participation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation is proud to join this novel Collaborative Community and is represented by Cristin Welle, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Colorado and a member of the Reeve Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board.
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