The slow but steady research into treatments for Spinal Cord injuries

One misjudged dive into a swimming pool when he was just 13 years old left Lee Taniwha with what’s been called “an incurable life sentence” – he’s tetraplegic and has caregivers assisting him 24/7. 

Twenty years later, Lee is a leader in the field of disability support and is also connected to the work of the Centre for Brain Research at the University of Auckland, where a team of 25 researchers have identified five streams of work to try to restore some function to people like Lee. 

The work is headed by Professor Darren Svirskis, director of the CatWalk Cure Programme – he and Lee told Clare de Lore on Newstalk ZB’s Brainstorming podcast of their hopes for breakthroughs. 

Lee cites the work of Darren’s team when he’s trying to support some of the younger, mostly men who’ve joined the ranks of paraplegia or tetraplegia. 

“I always say we have Kiwis on the case and they say “sweet, that’s awesome” so the word is getting out there ... a lot of people seem to trust the Number 8 wire thing, they know the Kiwis have got this. The conversations have been a bit more light because of that, there is a lot of hope out there,” he says. 

What counts as a cure or progress is in the eye of the beholder, with Lee pointing out that some people would love to simply regain use of their hands to hold a beer or to play a computer game. 

Darren says the Cure Programme work at the Centre for Brain Research, the CBR, is focussed on the development and delivery of drugs, cell replacement therapy, the use of ultra-sound, electrical field therapy and how to translate work in the labs or on animals to human beings. 

Work with chemical cues for drugs can, for example, try to deal with the scar tissue left on the spinal cord after injury. That’s one area of research and another involves cell replacement. 

“I work with some very clever people – Amy McCaughhey-Chapman and Bronwen Connor have developed a technology over the last ten years where they can take one of your skin cells, from any of us, and they can directly reprogramme that into the cells you would find in the spinal cord or in the brain. We need those for normal function and they are lost after a spinal cord injury. So they are looking to replace those. It is an amazing technology that we are trying to apply at the moment to spinal cord injury.” 

Darren says it’s probably 8-10 years before that work on cell replacement progresses and explains that there is a need, in all the research being carried out, to consider safety, efficacy and the regulatory environment. 

Another of the exciting possibilities, electric field therapy, an invasive procedure, will take another decade or so to translate from animals to humans and to scale up to a device for human clinical trials. 

Darren says there is a good reason to proceed with the utmost care with an invasive procedure and that is to preserve the residual function remaining of potential candidates for surgery. 

“You don’t want to risk losing more. In surgery, you are accessing the cord, you are making a cut to inject something, it is scary stuff. You want to give people assurance you are not going to do more damage along the way. That is a decade away.” 

“We will try stuff and it won’t always work because it is research. If we knew it was going to work, it wouldn’t be research. We are contributing to a global effort and seeing more and more clinical trials and seeing some recovery we have not seen before. We want to be part of that. I would hope the big breakthrough would come from our lab, wouldn’t that be great? But I would be happy reaching the end of my career and saying these are things we have contributed to.” 

Lee Taniwha would love to regain some use of his limbs or feeling but knows research is, of necessity, slow.  

“I know for the next person who is 13, they will have a chance and that is what a lot of us would hope for. That it is happening in New Zealand, that is a game changer, that gives me a lot more hope. I have learned how to live but this could really change the landscape for the newer injured guys.” 

Brainstorming with Clare de Lore has new episodes every second Wednesday on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts – powered by Newstalk ZB.