MEDICAL RESEARCH Reeve leaves legacy of hope to heal spinal cord injuries

Since 1999, the actor's foundation has given researchers $40 million.
TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL
TORONTO -- The late Christopher Reeve had a special interest in the rats at Toronto Western Hospital. He not only contributed to their upkeep, but bet on the future they might herald.
The Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation gave hospital researchers a two-year, $150,000 grant in January to fund groundbreaking stem-cell experiments with lab rodents -- and to move the project quickly into human subjects.
The Toronto group is now one of just four in the world to harvest stem cells from the spinal cords of adult rats. These were transplanted into the broken backs of paralyzed rats. Yet even before the scientists know whether the cells can fix the rats' spinal cords, they are investigating the possibility in humans.
In the past eight months, the researchers have collected spinal-cord tissue from eight organ donors, trying to pinpoint human stem cells. Though they have so far not succeeded, the Reeve grant allows them to keep looking.
"He was very keen on developing strategies to replace the damaged tissue [in spinal-cord injuries]," said Charles Tator, a neurosurgeon at the hospital's Krembil Neuroscience Center who is leading the lab work financed by the Reeve foundation.
What happened
Reeve died Sunday of heart failure, after a bedsore poisoned his blood. The Toronto project is but a small example of the massive legacy the film star leaves the world of spinal-cord research.
In Canada, his foundation funded other research, including several projects in Vancouver, where one researcher studied the very complications that led to Reeve's death.
Before an equestrian accident turned the former Superman star into a quadriplegic in 1995, research into spinal cord-injuries was chronically underfunded. But Reeve put the issue on the public agenda.
His foundation has given researchers $40 million since 1999, and the actor himself rolled through labs, visiting Toronto twice, to "raise awareness and money."
The result, researchers say, might be measured in the number of promising therapies now on the horizon.
"Christopher directly generated tens of millions of dollars. Worldwide, it has made a tremendous impact," said Dr. John Steeves, director of the Vancouver-based International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD). "There's a lot of fruit coming to bear."
Treatments
Among the exciting prospects under investigation: drugs to help nerve cells sprout new nerve fibers; transplanting into damaged spinal cords olfactory cells, linked to smell, that regularly regenerate; transplanting immune-system cells directly into spinal cords shortly after an injury is sustained; and the implanting of stem cells, which have the power to proliferate and become all sorts of specialized tissues.
Tator, who has been involved in spinal-cord research for 30 years, said, "The number of potential treatments have never been greater. There's probably 15 hot strategies and any one of them might be the winner. Though it's more likely that there will be no one magic bullet."
For example, Tator and University of Toronto researcher Molly Shoicet earned international attention in 2001 when they demonstrated that they could restore some movement to the legs of paralyzed rats by building a specially engineered, tubelike bridge between two severed ends of a spinal cord.