NeuroPair: A New Treatment Approach for Spinal Cord Injury

Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) afflicts 17,000 Americans and 700,000 people worldwide each year. Prognoses are often tragic, and social costs exceed $2 million in the first 5 years of care. For decades, the dream of repairing the spinal cord has been elusive. Recent studies, however, show that new axonal growth and formation of functional circuits are possible under the right conditions: a favorable biophysical environment in direct contact with surviving nerve endings. Chances for recovery increase greatly if such an environment can be provided rapidly after injury.

NeuroPair's fast and minimally invasive approach generates an injectable scaffold of aligned magnetic nanoparticles to create conditions for protecting, healing, and regrowing neurons that were damaged during SCI. The scaffold guides the direction of neuronal regrowth and may help enable recovery from SCI.

Because shape and condition of SCIs vary so much, one-size-fits-all approaches are very unlikely to succeed. NeuroPair’s injectable hydrogel formulation addresses these needs by perfectly filling any irregular shape of the injury site, generating a flexible fiber scaffold with cellular contact for neuronal regeneration within minutes, suppressing scar formation, and being compatible with other treatment options (such as stem cells, neuroprotective and bioactive growth factors, epidural stimulation, and MRI). No other approach like this exists.

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