The Live Wire

Clinical Initiative

In 2001 Spinal Research started the Clinical Initiative – an ambitious programme of research activities whose aim was to ensure that hurdles to human application of the many experimental treatments that showed great promise in the laboratory could be overcome.

Researchers agreed to concentrate on a problem that was common to all therapeutic concepts – namely, how to ensure accurate and sensitive measurements of improvements in function that would hopefully follow treatment.

The second stage of the Clinical Initiative – which is made up of an international consortium of groups with complementary expertise – is now well underway and 2007 saw the completion of the first project of this stage.

Each group within the Clinical Initiative is now testing and validating a ‘toolkit’ of assessment techniques in patients and is well placed for inclusion in clinical trials.

Particularly noteworthy is the progress being made in applying assessment tools for motor function. Such is the robustness and utility of these protocols they have been adopted by an international pharmaceutical company to help develop one of their lead therapeutics for spinal cord injury. This gives us reason to hope that one of the desired outcomes will be achieved – the realisation of a global standard of assessment for those mending damaged spinal cord and transforming lives.

But we cannot rest there. Spinal Research is now working on the details of where, in the demanding process of bringing experimental proof of concept to the bedside – called translational science – we need to focus the next stage of the Clinical Initiative.

Although we are all impatient for a 'cure', it is so important that our move to clinical trials is done properly according to best practice so that the results can have maximum benefit.

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