Research summary
Every year, Canadians suffer more than 4,000 spinal cord injuries. Because the adult nervous system cannot repair itself, many of these people are left without the ability to walk or perform the everyday tasks that most of us take for granted.
Dr. Karim Fouad, Canada Research Chair in Spinal Cord Injury, is generating the knowledge needed to help people recover after spinal cord injury. He and his research team are identifying and trying to enhance the mechanisms that underlie inflammation-induced neuroplasticity. (Neuroplasticity is the central nervous system’s ability to reorganize itself by creating new neural connections.) They are also working to promote the regeneration of axons (the parts of nerve cells that send electrical messages to other cells) and devising ways to use biomaterials as treatments. In addition, they are developing an open-data commons to enable the meta-analysis of shared data on all types of neurotrauma in order to support the discovery of treatments.