In the lavish "Captain America 3: Civil War", the superheroes divide into two factions on "whether they should be subject to special legal supervision", and then fight at the airport because of the misunderstanding of the Winter Soldiers. During the pursuit, The War Machine Colonel Rhodes was hit by the hot light of the illusion and fell from a height, seriously injured and paralyzed.
With the help of Iron Man, Rhode regained his footing through external machinery and later performed well in both Infinity War and Endgame, blowing Up Thanos' army with covered firepower.
The technology in Marvel movies is not so much science fiction, but the fantasy component is more. Iron Man's technology is unimaginably advanced, but nature has recently developed a new solution to help paralysis patients with spinal cord injury walk again.
Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a spinal cord injury caused by external direct or indirect factors, often resulting in severe dysfunction of the limb below the injured segment. Spinal cord injuries caused by the war years were mostly gunshot wounds, explosive injuries and knife stabbings; today spinal cord injuries are more common in smashing, falling, falling injuries, traffic accidents and sports injuries. Spinal cord injury can cause serious physical and psychological harm to the patient himself, and today, the prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of spinal cord injury has become a major topic in today's medical community.
The cure of spinal cord injury has always been a medical problem, and although traditional treatment methods can alleviate symptoms to a certain extent, they have not yet had effective results for changes in nerve function.
Spinal cord injury has long been widely believed to result in severed links between the brain and limbs – necrosis of brain neurons or nerve fibers – and that nerve cell damage due to a recovery window of more than 6 months is irreversible. Scientists are trying to repair the bridge between the brain and the limbs to restore neurotransmission. Scientists' eyes have fallen on stem cells, which can differentiate into nerve cells and replace damaged neurons.
The West China Hospital of Sichuan University is conducting clinical research on stem cell treatment of spinal cord injury, and the project has passed the national record.
Research on stem cells producing nerve cells is still being studied, but since spinal cord injury is a cut off link between the brain and the limbs, can the curve save the country, with the help of an instrument to simulate the brain's signals to control the limbs, and regain control of the limbs? On February 9, Nature Medicine published the paper "Activity-dependent spinal cord neuromodulation rapidly restores trunk and leg motor functions after complete paralysis" (activity-dependent spinal neuromodulation can quickly restore trunk and leg motor function after complete paralysis). In the paper, neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine and his team at ETH Zurich (EFPL) describe an implant capable of mimicking signals received by the lower body to control movement.
Electrical signals from the brain control the balance and movement of the lower extremities, and spinal cord injuries can cut off the transmission of this signal, causing paralysis. But neurons in the extremities usually remain intact and are still able to receive signals. An epidural stimulator is a device that stops chronic pain in patients with spinal cord injury by applying an electric current to neurons, and scientists use these devices to restore some of the patient's motor ability.
Grégoire Courtine's team used magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography to map the size and layout of neurons in the spinal cord and created predictive models based on data from 27 experimental subjects. They implanted the device into three treatment subjects whose lower body was paralyzed by spinal cord injury and adjusted each person's current to achieve different degrees of movement by controlling the amount of current and the stimulation pattern. As a result, the three men regained some motor capacity within a day of implanting the device and were able to walk on a treadmill in a supported state.
"Walking again is like a dream." Michel Roccati, who was treated, said excitedly in an interview.
In fact, as early as July 2019, Nature published an article titled "How a revolutionary technique got people with spinal-cord injuries back on their feet" (a revolutionary technique to get spinal cord injuries back on their feet). In the article, Rob Summers, who was injured in a car accident and injured his spinal cord, was able to move his toes after implanting an epidural electrical stimulator.
Reggie Edgerton, a physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has also been working on this for a long time, and Reggie Edgerton's scheme is less invasive than Grégoire Courtine's, simply attaching electrodes to the skin.
Back in the 1970s, Reggie Edgerton discovered that cats with spinal cord injuries were able to walk again with simple guidance when suspended from a treadmill. Through guidance, the cat adjusts the cadence to match the speed of the treadmill, or even changes direction — there is no brain signal transmission throughout the process.
In 1993, Susan Harkema joined Reggie Edgerton's team, and when she started working with cats, she was curious about "how these animals can restore so much function." They also experimented with an epidural stimulator. Both Reggie Edgerton and Susan Harkema believe that after training and stimulation, patients with spinal cord injury are able to walk again. At that time, they only needed an experiment to test their ideas.
In 2007, Rob Summers began receiving treatment from Susan Harkema, and after more than two years of intensive rehabilitation, Rob Summers was fitted with an epidural stimulator, they placed an array of electrodes between his vertebrae and spinal cord, and a wire connected the array to the stimulator...
It turned out that Rob Summers' idea was correct, and the slight twist of the toe was an incomparably important validation.
Grégoire Courtine and his team's research doesn't stop there, and they hope to further simplify the technology, allowing patients to control it on a daily basis via their phones. At present, the project has been approved by the FDA.
Resources:
1.How a revolutionary technique got people with spinal-cord injuries back on their feet.
2.Activity-dependent spinal cord neuromodulation rapidly restores trunk and leg motor functions after complete paralysis.
3.Stimulating spinal cord helps paralysed people to walk again.
4.Stem cells and spinal-cord injuries: an intricate issue.
Image source network.
Edit: Ge Ge Wu