Hey Kosters! Remember when I told you a while back that a bunch of wheelchair people were going to go to DC for a rally and to lobby our esteemed congress members? Hereis a link to that history, if you care to read it.
We did go. I want to share it with you because I, like lots of you, have lately been feeling pretty angry and hostile toward our system. Ever since the Democrats handed the president a 3 month get out of accountability free card--especially since it will be paid for with yet more sacrifice from nobody they know or care about--my attitude toward this congress has been, oh, what's the phrase? Crapped out. Yes, that's it.
HOWEVER. While in DC, I learned a number of remarkable scientific good news bits, I spent quality time with some very engaging paralyzed people, and I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that when you have the majority, everything is fresh and new. The Republican staffers who stiffed you last year speak to you with respect and courtesy. The Democratic staffers are upbeat . . . And then there's the PONY!
UPDATE . . . can somebody help me resize that photograph???
The scientific good news first: my friends, the momentum towards curing spinal cord injury is growing ALMOST as fast as I want it to. For those who are curious, the situation is this. The inside of a damaged cord is kind of like a poisoned patch of ground. There is scar tissue like boulders. There are no seedlings of neurons trying to sprout. There is actual poison in the tissue, killing anything that tries to grow. And there is a sad lack of good fertilizer-like stuff that needs to be there to help things grow.
One thing that makes this nut so very hard to crack is the necessity of solving all of those problems at once, at least a little bit. The sheer mass of possible combinations is daunting, plus the difficulty of controlling things in such a way that more damage is not done in the effort to fix such a fragile system. Then there is the fact that our president is a moron about science who doesn't even know that he has nearly succeeded in stopping American researchers from even working on the seedling part of the puzzle. But ha ha ha, Mister Bush! Your deeply immoral stance on embryonic stem cells will be yet another reason so many people hate you.
Here, in brief, is what I heard at our science symposium in DC:
- Dr. Stephen Davies at the University of Colorado is making great strides in solving--at least partially--2 of the puzzles. He's got stuff that he's pretty sure can break up scar tissue. And he's got cells that can remind those neurons how to grow. He got nine out of nine lab rats back to full functioning after treating them, and he's gearing up to test for safety and efficacy with human subjects.
- Dr. Wise Young of Rutgers has set up a network of 15 centers in China, where he'll oversee a clinical trial that tests 400 people with chronic spinal cord injury, probably next year. His puzzle pieces are about supplying both cells and "fertilizer."
- Dr. Frank Bobe of Boston Life Sciences described a trial with a drug called Cethrin that has already shown itself to be a very potent little "weed" killer. BLS has safety trials going on right now in 9 North American cities, and the patients involved in them are having no side effects AND getting functional return.
- Dr Donald Johns of Novartis described another trial underway right now in Germany and Switzerland, this targeting yet another of the nastiest "weeds" in the injured cord.
- Dr. Edward Wirth of Geron . . . Geron is the company that funded the University of Madison's groundbreaking work in embryonic stem cell research. Geron has succeeded in growing a certain very specialized cell that is necessary to re-build the waxy coating on axons that makes them able to conduct information from brain to muscle and back again. Geron has enough pure, non-mouse-tainted stem cells to make a MILLION doses of this stuff, and they have spent the last 3 years getting ready to do human testing. This year they'll apply to the FDA for a phase 1 clinical trial. And guess what? All those doses will have come from a single blastocyst that was freely donated by some generous couple who didn't want to see it just thrown into the trash.
Wow, and that was just the beginning. You must imagine a roomful of quads and paras welcoming this news, and especially welcoming these people come from around the world to deliver it to them. We all knew these were not the sort of people who would risk reputations and careers to blow smoke up our asses. This stuff is real.
Here is a link to a live blog I did of the event, with many image and video links embedded.
And what about that pony?
Well, on the day we were doing our legislative visits, my friend Betsy happened to be down in the basement of the Senate Office Building, where she happened upon a stack of boxes waiting to be shipped out. She had her photograph taken with them. Seems that a couple of senators lost their seats last year, and their stuff is still sitting in the aisle like so much trash. Ha ha ha!