this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Scientists regenerate neurons that restore walking in mice after paralysis from spinal cord injury (phys.org)
submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Scientists regenerate neurons that restore walking in mice after paralysis from spinal cord injury::In a new study in mice, a team of researchers from UCLA, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Harvard University have uncovered a crucial component for restoring functional activity after spinal cord injury. The neuroscientists have shown that re-growing specific neurons back to their natural target regions led to recovery, while random regrowth was not effective.

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[–] ikapoz@sh.itjust.works 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is actually one case insurance companies would be ALL OVER a real fix. People with spinal injuries have tons of medical complications that cost throughout their entire life. An insurance company would definitely be interested in unloading persistent fiscal drains like that.

Don’t get me wrong, the medical insurance industry is a fucking terror, especially in the US with the degree of regulatory capture involved. In this one case though, a real cure would serve their interests at anything less than a massive cost on their part.

[–] Jax@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If that's the case, wouldn't the same logic be applied to novel cancer treatments? Last time I checked those have a tendency to evaporate mysteriously, and insurance companies weren't exactly stopping it.

Idk, just seams a little idealistic.

[–] ikapoz@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

The only ideal that type of company has at its heart is the pursuit of profit. If they see a real cure that costs less than the long term “maintenance” care they would be all over it. If not, then not.

Novel cancer treatments aren’t a terribly good comparison in my opinion. Rarely does a single one in isolation offer a clear and permanent cure - though with any categorization that broad there are of course exceptions.

Hell, when scientists identify care that is likely enough to prevent the need of reactive treatment insurance companies often make it free to lower their overall costs - teeth cleaning and flu shots for example. That’s not altruism on their part, it’s economics.

[–] Ryantific_theory@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The difference though is that this treatment would require hundreds of hours of ongoing work from medical professionals for each treatment. What they did was use single cell RNA sequencing to determine which subpopulations of cells are supposed to connect and where, before stimulating cell growth and guiding each RNA mapped subpopulation to where it's roughly supposed to go. That's one thing for anatomically complete sub-millimeter spinal cord injuries in mice, but a massive endeavor for human spinal cords.

If you've seen the bioengineered cancer treatments where researchers grow immune cells to target a single individual's tumor, the amount of specialized work that goes into that pales to what current technology would require for this sort of spinal regeneration, and that's for relatively simple small scale lesions. Multiple lesions or large scale cell death could result in attempting to selectively guide millions of microscopic axons in neat clusters for over a foot.

I wouldn't be surprised if insurance companies refused to pay for cell regrowth, and instead went for implants that are comparatively much simpler to install and modify in brain-computer interfaces that skip over the damage. This is a great advancement and does open the door for recovering from spinal cord damage, but this is one of those treatments that people are going to get because they need to fill FDA trials and won't charge, or because the patient is filthy rich.