Monthly Archives: August 2020

NASCAR legends Tony Stewart and Darrell Waltrip, Daytona 500 Champion Ryan Newman, WWE Wrestler Bill Goldberg, Former MillerCoors Chairman Pete Coors, and Bass Pro Shop Founder Johnny Morris among Notables to Participate in the Inaugural Darrell Gwynn Wheelchair Challenge

A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering and the University of Michigan has redesigned and enhanced a natural enzyme that shows promise in promoting the regrowth of nerve tissue following injury.

Their new version is more stable than the protein that occurs in nature, and could lead to new treatments for reversing nerve damage caused by traumatic injury or stroke.

The former Indycar racer loves his new car!

In 2000, Indycar racer Sam Schmidt was doing a testing run at Walt Disney World Speedway when he spun out of control and crashed, severing his spinal cord between his 3rd and 4th vertebrae.

He had gone from being a race-winning Indycar League driver to a quadriplegic in the space of a moment. However, he was determined to keep racing and formed an Indycar racing team just 14 months after being paralyzed. That team was Schmidt Peterson Motorsports.

National Institutes of Health grant will enable Hedong Li to focus on role of micorRNAs in the reprogramming process

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Hedong Li, associate research professor of biology, has been awarded $1.8 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how microRNAs — small segments of genetic material — could be used in treatments for spinal cord injury. The five-year grant builds upon previous work by Li and colleagues to convert glial cells, support cells that surround neurons, into functioning neurons.

At the BioMag Laboratory, the first promising results have been achieved in the application of synchronised electrical and magnetic stimulation therapy when rehabilitating a paraplegic patient and restoring his ability to walk.

The simultaneous stimulation of the motor nerves of the brain and limbs (paired associative stimulation) has yielded promising research results.

Top 7 Accessible Adventure Travel Organizations

Despite COVID-19 getting in the way of everyone’s travel plans for the year, there is still plenty of time to daydream about your next adventure!

InVivo Therapeutics is a research and clinical-stage biomaterials and biotechnology company with a focus on treatment of spinal cord injuries.

By modulating the healing environment to facilitate cell survival and growth, we have the opportunity to change the treatment of spinal cord injury.

NEW HAVEN — Lindsey Runkel says there are no inappropriate questions to ask her.

There certainly are many questions to ask.

Like, how does a nurse, paralyzed from the chest down, do her job from a wheelchair? How does she stay so effervescently positive all the time? Why does she continue to go mountain biking after a crash in New Hampshire pinched her spinal cord, breaking two vertebrae?

Bilateral L4 dorsal root ganglion (DRG) stimulation has been shown to evoke strong and reproducible motor responses in the upper leg in patients with chronic motor complete spinal cord injury (SCI).

In their paper published in Neuromodulation, authors Sadaf Soloukey and colleagues from Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, refer to their study as the “first of its kind” to demonstrate the potential of the DRG as a new target for reproducible and potentially weight-bearing muscle recruitment in this particular cohort of patients.

Rocky Stoutenburgh, a.k.a. RockyNoHands, has just made history yet again. The pro gamer was previously inducted into the Guinness World Records 2020 and Guinness World Records 2020 Gamer’s Edition, earning two different records in Fortnite while using a mouth-operated joystick. Now, according to a report from TheGamer, RockyNoHands has become the first quadriplegic gamer to be signed to a professional esports organization.