The National Institutes of Health has awarded University of California, Irvine, and the University of Miami contracts to become the first centers in the nation to duplicate other scientists' research in spinal-cord injury treatment. The contracts are part of a larger spinal-cord injury research and treatment effort and are the first federal funds to finance the replication of research in the field, NIH officials said Tuesday.
The Reeve-Irvine Research Center at UCI received $2.6 million to have technicians independently prove or disprove work done at institutions all over the country. The Miami Project to Prevent Paralysis will do similar tests, and both will make public the results.
By replicating research, the centers hope to find the work that will lead to cures. There are between 250,000 and 450,000 people living in the United States with spinal-cord injuries.
One of the most famous, actor Christopher Reeve, has funded work to reverse the trauma. Scientists' incremental improvements have kept Reeve out of the hospital for three years and allowed him to wiggle his fingers and hips, said Susan Howley, director of research for the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation in New Jersey, which is not affiliated with the Reeve-Irvine Center.
"There is not going to be a magic bullet cure for spinal-cord injury," she said. "One of the historic problems in this field is that one hears about a promising animal study and it generates an enormous amount of excitement, but there are no published replications of that study. That has led to a lot of confusion in the field, a lot of misunderstanding." None of the progress in the United States has led to federally funded trials in people - and that is partially because none of the research was replicated by others, Reeve-Irvine Research Center Director Oswald Steward said.
"Most people in the field see this as the principal impediment to taking basic discoveries from the laboratory and moving them to clinical interventions," Steward said.
Researchers have little incentive to independently replicate another team's work. Prestigious journals do not usually publish rehashed ideas. University researchers looking for tenure are not going to find it by duplicating someone else's work. And until Tuesday, there was no federal money available for it.
But the need is uniquely great in the world of spinal-cord injury treatment because patients lack motor, sensory and pain neurons. Scientists are always concerned that the work they do could result in leaving patients in chronic pain or restoring nothing other than their pain neurons. It is possible for people to feel pain but still be unable to walk or control their bowels.
"We all are sensitive to the need for new treatments for spinal-cord injury. There is so much promise, so many people who could benefit. But we wanted the work to be rock-solid, replicable, before we took essentially healthy people with spinal-cord injury and encouraged that they be exposed to clinical trials," said Naomi Kleitman, a program director for the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, a part of the NIH.
Reeve-Irvine received two of the four contracts totaling $8 million that the NIH issued to advance spinal-cord research and injury reversal. Steward's other contract will allow him to try to figure out a way to predict how results in animal studies will translate to humans, Kleitman said.
Other nations are doing clinical trials in this field, but U.S. researchers said the science is not yet ready. Steward hopes the work that will be done by his team and by the University of Miami will speed science's progress. Next week, both centers are expected to begin selecting which research findings they will try to duplicate.