My Virtual Reading Room

Stimulation Helps Paralyzed People Stand, Walk Within Hours of Surgery

— Targeting dorsal roots restored motor function quickly, first-in-man study shows

Personalized epidural electrical stimulation (EES) restored independent motor movements in three patients with complete sensorimotor paralysis hours after therapy began, data from the ongoing STIMO clinical trial showed.

Within a single day, spinal cord stimulation programs enabled these patients to stand, walk, cycle, swim, and control their trunk movements, reported Jocelyne Bloch, MD, of Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland, and Grégoire Courtine, PhD, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and co-authors in Nature Medicine.

With CRISPR gene editing, unique treatments begin to take off for rare diseases

Researchers and patients are excited about recent advancements, but such experiments have their own sets of risks and challenges

CRISPR-Cas9, whose creators were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry a mere eight years after its discovery, allows researchers to alter the DNA of living things at will. It works like genetic scissors that can insert, repair or edit individual genes to rewrite the code of life. The system itself consists of two molecules — a protein known as Cas9 that works like scissors and a guide RNA that takes Cas9 to the right place in the genome — that can be inserted into cells or the bloodstream.

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...Gene therapy is what we discussed in class, a bit over 20 years ago...

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There's an excellent 4-minute video explaining how CRISPR editing works in this Washington Post article from 2015

And more info about the discovery process is here ...