Stem Cell Therapies for Paralyzed Pooches

Meet Tobi – a six-year-old cocker spaniel whose hind legs are paralyzed. Tobi is one of the first participants in and beneficiaries of a clinical trial to test stem cell treatments for paralysis.

NC State neurologist Dr. Natasha Olby specializes in researching treatments for long-term paralysis in dogs. According to Olby, even in the case of severe spinal cord injury all may not be lost in terms of spinal cord function – there may still be salvageable, living nerves and nerve fibers, or axons, bridging the site of the injury that could still transmit signals if they had a little help.

Often, these damaged nerves have lost the myelin sheath, fatty material that coats axons and allows them to conduct signals. Olby wants to restore the myelin sheath to these surviving axons by taking fat cells from the patient and turning them into stem cells that can be combined with nerve cells and injected into the site of the damage, regrowing the sheath. She is currently in the early stages of a randomized clinical trial involving this therapy, and the results thus far are encouraging.

Dogs won’t be the only beneficiaries of Olby’s research. If the therapy produces positive results in dogs, then translating the treatment to humans is a natural next step. And in humans, even very small improvements have the capacity to radically transform quality of life.

“Even if this procedure produced an effect in a person as small as giving him or her partial control of one finger, that could allow the patient to use a computer, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities in terms of communication and interaction with the outside world,” Olby says.