I'll give you an idea about a third of the cases we see as a neurological service
in the veterinary hospital are cases with some sort of spinal cord injury so it is very
common is about probably 500 dogs a year here in Bristol treating spinal injury
has this two major steps one is to treat the acute phase so the when the dog
becomes paralyzed so it could be surgery for realigning the spine it could be
surgery to remove compression and the nerves so that's one set of treatment
and second set of of treatment would be in a chronic phase for those animals who
have not recovered so they had a bad injury remain paralyzed one of the
treatment that has become potentially very useful is to use cells from the
nasal cavity from from the nose and harvest them from those and transplant
them in the spinal cord to help the core to regenerate the start of the process
will be having a small pipe see from the nose which is probably a very small
fragment of tissue that would then process and put in a dish and the cells will
start to expand so there is a process of multiplication where the cells grow to
reach the number we wish for transplantation. Our olfactory system or
smell system lose its neurons all the time because they're exposed to air dust
smoke and so on so we lose neurons in the nose all the time but they do
regenerate and we do keep our sense of smell all the time that doesn't
disappear and the reason for that is because new neurons forms in the nose
naturally and they link with the brain all the time and to do this link they
need supporting cells, olfactory cells are supporting cells helping nerve to
grow and make connection with the brain so that's the the natural history of
what's happening in the smell system but if you do take these cells out of their
natural environment put them in a damaged region of the brain or spinal
cord then they do carry on having this function of supporting nerve to regrow
and what we were trying to do is the spinal cord is really bridging the gap
the lesion gap that has been caused by the trauma
so we put the cells into the into the lesion and hopefully they will help the
nerves to regenerate you can see or you can detect an effect of the of the cells
in a sense that you see a change in locomotion so these dogs can walk better
with the cells and we gain some control movement of their legs now it's not
magic treatment and and obviously not a hundred percent of dogs who would get the cells
get an improvement but we had enough success to show scientifically that
this was valid and about twenty five percent of the cases we transplanted in
that way had some some visible changes with the naked eye on their gait and
legs movements using yourselves a circuit has been done in humans as well
but as the safety trials so it's only a very limited number of people or
patients the way forward would be to try and improve how we deliver the cells
into the spinal cord because it's one thing to inject them and sure there's an
effect another thing to then go onto a person and how did you actually deliver
the cells so they survive and are numerous in the region so there's a
problem with how do we deliver them so of course when dogs get paralyzed they
also lose control of their of their bladders and so they become incontinent
which is a big problem and one of the methods we've been testing in dogs to
solve this problem is to use what we call neural prosthesis there's small
silicone implants we can place on the nerves below the lesions if the lesions
in the middle of the back of the dog can still exploit the spinal chord below the
lesion that's there and it's usually fine and has survived it's a technique
that's used in humans been used for 30 years in humans so it's not new but but
it's one of example where something that is working in humans has we've taken it
from humans and then implemented it in dogs so it's actually the in the other
way is a reverse translation isn't it so by putting new prostheses small implants
in the nerve you can do a surgery for that you can take control of the
nerves that are remaining and under are going to the bladder and it's very is
very effective and you can then with a remote control these nerves in different
ways so so you can empty the bladder regularly which obviously prevents from
having to do it manually pressing on the tummy of the dog which is bit
distressing for the owner or putting catheter into the bladder which creates
infections a lot of the time so new procedures is a good is a good way of
exploiting the preserved part of the spinal chord.