Hope through innovation: Detroit scientists rethink treatment for spinal cord injury recovery – School of Medicine News

The 24 hours following a traumatic spinal cord injury are the most critical for patients' long-term quality of life. This is true even for patients with incomplete spinal cord injuries – injuries in which the spinal cord can still send some signals to or from the brain and patients have some feeling and muscle control below the injury site.

According to a research team at Wayne State University, a critical challenge in treating incomplete spinal cord injuries is developing an effective intervention within this 24-hour window that has a positive impact on long-term functional mobility. Drug therapies have proven ineffective because they must be administered via the bloodstream – resulting in a significant delay in building up effective concentrations at the target site – and must cross multiple membrane systems (e.g., the blood-spinal cord barrier). This delay compromises the prospects for rescue and regeneration of neurons at the injury site.

To remedy this situation, a research team at Wayne State University received a five-year, nearly $2.8 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health to study “Noninvasive Infrared Light Therapy and Medical Device for the Treatment of Spinal Cord Injury.” Co-leaders include Moh Malek, Ph.D., professor of physical therapy in the Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, and Maik Hüttemann, Ph.D., professor of molecular medicine and genetics and of biochemistry, microbiology and immunology in the School of Medicine.

“Mitochondria are often referred to as the 'powerhouses of the cell' because over 90% of the cell's energy is generated there,” said Dr. Hüttemann. “Therefore, disruptions to the mitochondria can negatively affect energy production, leading to cell dysfunction. This is the case, for example, in traumatic spinal cord injuries, where the mitochondria initially become hyperactive and therefore produce large amounts of harmful reactive oxygen species or 'free radicals', leading to a cascade of events that trigger the death of nerve cells.”

Dr. Hüttemann pioneered the development of an infrared light device for which he received several patents and founded a start-up called Mitovation. While most commercially available infrared light systems increase mitochondrial activity, the wavelengths he discovered decrease mitochondrial activity.

“The idea to start this research came to me while I was following the National Institutes of Health conference SCI 2020: Launching a Decade for Disruption in Spinal Cord Injury Research, which addressed, among other things, the urgent need to develop new and innovative treatment strategies for the first 24 hours after spinal cord injury,” said Dr. Malek. “Sometimes a fresh perspective from people outside the research field is needed to examine a problem and develop a potential solution. Although neither Maik nor I are researchers in the field of spinal cord injury, we have been working together in the field of mitochondrial function for 14 years, so the use of infrared light technology presented a unique opportunity to potentially treat incomplete spinal cord injuries in the first 24 hours after trauma.”

The project will use patented non-invasive infrared light technology to target mitochondria in the injured spinal cord with the goal of reducing reactive oxygen production, which is detrimental to neuronal cell regeneration.

“This research project is a great example of taking a technology developed at a university and applying it to a different purpose in the hopes of developing therapies that have not been thought of before,” said Dr. Ezemenari Obasi, vice president of research and innovation at Wayne State University. “Dr. Malek and Dr. Hüttemann have come up with a creative new approach that may one day give us answers to important gaps in spinal cord research that could ultimately help many.”

Using a team science approach, Dr. Malek and Dr. Hüttemann, along with their co-investigators and advisors Dr. Dennis Goebel (WSU School of Medicine), Dragana Komnenov (WSU School of Medicine), Wassim Tarraf (WSU Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences), Gerry Hish (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor), Thomas Sanderson (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor), Linda Noble Haeusslein (University of Texas, Austin), and Victor Chang (Henry Ford Health), will conduct a series of longitudinal experiments under this grant and ultimately develop a prototype of their infrared light delivery system for human use.

“After five years, we will be ready to propose a Phase I clinical trial to determine the critical next steps for this potential treatment,” said Dr. Malek and Dr. Hüttemann.

The grant number for this research study from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health is NS134695.