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Microcap & Penny Stocks : NEOTHERAPEUTICS (NEOT) (NEOTW) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T. Reilly who wrote (252)	5/5/1998 7:24:00 PM
From: Junehee Lee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 705

For thousands of years, a spinal cord injury meant one thing: If the patient survived the accident or the pneumonia that was likely to set in soon after, he was destined to spend the rest of his life in a chair. A spinal cord injury is ''not to be treated,'' Egyptian physicians wrote 2,500 years ago, and until the last decade or so there was not much to challenge that philosophy. Few young researchers were tempted to spend their lives on what was believed to be a pursuit down a dead-end road. That has changed dramatically, thanks to important discoveries and areas of research that have brought excitement to scientists and others in the tightknit community of spinal cord injury. ''The progress of the last five, six, seven years has been truly breathtaking,'' says Susan Howley, director of research at the American Paralysis Association. ''My expectation is that within the next few years, we're going to begin to see innovations move off the research bench and into clinical trials'' involving humans. Wise Young, director of the Neuroscience Center at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says advances are occurring on four major fronts: Reduction of damage to nerves. Methylprednisolone, a steroid, has been a standard treatment since 1990, when a study showed that people given the drug within eight hours of injury had less damage to their cell membranes, which contributes to death of nerve cells. The drug also reduced inflammation near the injury and suppressed the action of immune cells that contribute to nerve damage. Other drugs are being tested. Among these is GM-1 ganglioside, which appears to prevent secondary damage and improve the recovery of damaged nerve cells after injury. Recent research suggests that methylprednisolone should be given within 24 hours of injury, and GM-1 for the next six to eight weeks. The drug therapies make it possible for patients to recover function controlled by the spinal cord as much as two levels below the point of injury. Thus, a patient injured at the C2 level, at the base of the neck, could regain function at C4, with sensation down to the lower back. Replacement of nerve cells. Because nerve cells can't divide to heal a wound, scientists are looking at transplantation of cells into the area of in- jury. Fetal nerve cell transplantation has been successful in animals, but human fetal cell transplantation presents ethical concerns and poses the possibility of rejection, so scientists are looking to genetic engineering to produce nerve cells for grafting. They also are investigating the use of certain stem cells, unspecified cells that can develop into nerve cells. In a paper to be published May 15 in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis report success for the first time in getting the regenerated fibers to grow beyond the bridges and re-enter the spinal cord. Improving function of surviving nerve fibers. Researchers are trying to get the connections that remain after an injury to work again. One reason that they don't, in many cases, is damage to the myelin sheath, a coating over the nerve fibers that increases the transmission of signals along nerves. Scientists are testing a drug, 4-aminopyridine, that acts temporarily as a myelin coating, improving muscle response. What is exciting to researchers, says Xiao Ming Xu of St. Louis University Health Sciences Center, is that ''one does not need to restore 100% of nerve fibers for them to function. If we can restore 10% of the fibers, the functional recovery can be pretty good.'' While breakthroughs are likely in the next four or five years, Young says, ''there are still many unknowns in the equation. We need to work very hard at it, and we must have adequate resources to undertake the task. And it will take luck.'' ''I don't have a crystal ball, but I believe that it is an achievable goal. What I am impressed by is the number of scientists who have been willing to take on the challenge and to work very hard. We have therapies that make rats walk, and our task is to challenge some of these first-generation therapies into clinical trial.''