Work gets started on spinal cord injury ‘cure’
Researchers hope a “cure” for serious disabilities could soon be found in a Wollongong laboratory.
A $4.7 million research program launched yesterday could produce a major breakthrough in the treatment of muscle, nerve or spinal cord damage, according to Professor Gordon Wallace.
The program will be based at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science at the University of Wollongong’s Innovation Campus in Fairy Meadow.
An elite team of international researchers and students has been assembled to develop tiny implants with the capacity to trigger the regrowth of damaged nerves and muscles. Continue Reading »





Emily Shryock got involved in the sport of quad rugby to stay active and competitive despite using a wheelchair. What she gained was independence.
Scientists at Northwestern University in Chicago, with funding from the National Institutes of Health, have successfully bypassed the spinal cord and restored fine motor control to paralyzed limbs using a brain-computer interface.
For those whose arms as well as legs are paralyzed by spinal cord injury, no skill is more broadly useful to regain than the ability to grasp and move objects. Researchers
Sawyer Rosenstein was a 12-year-old middle school student in Ramsey when a punch to his stomach by a bully ended his dreams of becoming an actor and put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
John and Mary Ruckelshaus know the feeling of powerlessness.
Mark Pollock overcame blindness to take on some of the world’s toughest tests of endurance, until a fall left him paralysed and facing his greatest challenge yet – to walk again. Thanks to grim determination and pioneering ‘robotic legs’, that dream is now becoming a reality.
BOSTON — It’s been more than 16 years since Travis Roy, then a 20-year-old freshman, stepped onto the ice for his first-ever Boston University hockey game and was carried off a quadriplegic. A cracked vertebra left him paralyzed from the neck down.