Provincial MLA Naomi Yamamoto and BC Minister of Children and Family Development Stephanie Cadieux were at ICORD on July 14th to announce some exciting news: a $350,000 investment by the Province to support ICORD’s Physical Activity Research Centre (PARC), a community-based, integrated fitness and research facility. PARC is specifically designed and operated for people with SCI and equipped with fully-accessible, state-of-the-art exercise equipment.
“As someone who lives with a spinal cord injury, I appreciate the work that the researchers at ICORD do to support British Columbians living with this type of injury,” said Minister Cadieux on behalf of Health Minister Terry Lake. “This new funding will build on existing work, improve accessibility and support continued research into new rehabilitation strategies.”
“With this funding, we can now make the gym more accessible by extending our hours into the evening and weekends, and opening up the research to people with non-traumatic spinal cord injuries and other illnesses or diseases affecting the spinal cord. The funding will also allow us to build on research results to create and evaluate strategies to enhance participation in exercise and physical activity in the SCI community,” said ICORD researcher Dr. Tania Lam.
While the scale is widely used, it has been argued that an AIS assignment may not always provide an accurate prognosis due to confounding factors that limit examination. For example, the body areas demarcated for specific spinal nerves can differ between individuals and thus reduces the consistency of this scale. In addition, patients who have just suffered an SCI may not be fully conscious or may be under the influence of drugs or alcohol, lowering the scale’s accuracy due to this subjectivity. One of the goals of Dr. Brian Kwon and his research team is to develop an objective tool to evaluate injury severity and predict neurological outcome in patients who suffered an SCI, so that they can be treated post-injury as optimally and efficiently as possible.
In 2010, Dr. Kwon and his research team published a paper describing how the expression level of various proteins in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that circulates in the space surrounding the spinal cord can better predict motor outcome 6 months after sustaining an injury compared to the standard AIS classification. Some of these proteins were also detectable in the peripheral blood, albeit at a very low concentration.
There is no doubt that blood samples are easier to collect than CSF; however, the development of reliable and stable blood biomarkers of SCI have been extremely difficult to identify. Interestingly, recent studies have reported significant levels of various small RNA molecules, scalled microRNAs (miRNAs), in serum and other bodily fluids following Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury and stroke. This raises the possibility that circulating miRNAs could serve as useful clinical biomarkers for SCI.
Seth Tigchelaar is a PhD student in Dr. Kwon’s laboratory at ICORD. His research is focused on determining if traumatic SCI of varying injury severity provide unique miRNA fingerprints, particularly useful for the classification of SCI. In order to detect and quantify SCI specific miRNAs in blood and CSF samples, Seth will be using state-of-the-art sequencing technology, a relatively new technique used to profile thousands of transcripts simultaneously during a single experiment.
During the 2013 Society for Neuroscience (SFN) conference in San Diego, Seth had the opportunity to meet Dr. Kendall Van Keuren-Jensen of the TGen neurogenomics group, whose laboratory is focused on neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. They were among the first to apply next-generation sequencing to profile the miRNA fraction of human CSF. Together with Dr. Brian Kwon and Dr. Femke Streijger, Seth travelled to Phoenix, Arizona to visit the team at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), a genomics laboratory with affiliations to Arizona State University and the University of Arizona.
Over the span of two warm weeks in Arizona and with the expertise and guidance of Dr. Kendall Van Keuren-Jensen and her team, Seth mastered the protocol and techniques needed to isolate and sequence miRNA. “It was a very exciting process, to learn from the experts in this field, and be able to perform Next-Gen sequencing, myself,” said Seth. Presently, Seth is working with Dr. Corey Nislow at UBC Pharmaceutical Sciences where some of the next-gen sequencing technology exists, and is awaiting the results of the sequence data on the miRNA profile from blood and CSF samples taken from human SCI patients that he analyzed in Arizona.
Dr. Oruc’s research focuses on understanding the brain mechanisms behind higher-level vision with the goal of developing ways to reverse and rehabilitate visual dysfunction caused by different types of brain disorders such as prosopagnosia (face blindness) and autism spectrum disorder.
For example, she studies visual adaptation–how neurons in the brain can change as a result of experience. Dr. Oruc believes that this form of neuroplasticity can be used to help restore high-level visual function, such as recognition of objects and faces. She has already shown that visual adaptation produces a temporary benefit, a moment of hypersensitivity, to a person’s ability to identify faces. She is currently running a large-scale web-based study to examine how people detect, identify, and notice subtle changes in visual objects, and how this ability is impacted by prior visual experience. You can check this experiment out (and even participate) here.
Dr. Spering investigates how the brain uses visual information to control movements in humans. Or, in other words, how our movements can affect the way we see and perceive the world around us. She also studies various disease models and their impact on vision and the related motor responses ranging from schizophrenia to Parkinson’s disease, and most recently, SCI.
She and her graduate students are doing a variety of studies, from quite basic (recording eye movement and correlating movement and vision) to very complex (studying eye movements versus overall hitting performance in professional baseball players, and whether eye movements can be trained in order to improve performance).
Eventually, Dr. Spering hopes that the knowledge gained in this study could be used in the design and calibration of gaze-based assistive devices, or to help with gait and posture rehabilitation and obstacle avoidance training.
The Rick Hansen Institute has joined a team of international SCI organizations to conduct a survey with researchers and clinicians to identify barriers and facilitators to international SCI research. Results from this survey will help identify and implement initiatives that could be supported by SCI organizations to enhance international collaborations that will ultimately lead to improved care and future cure(s) for persons living with SCI. The survey will take 20 minutes to complete.
If you are a researcher or clinician, we encourage you to participate in this survey, and to share the survey link with anyone in your network who you think may be interested.