Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Take the Blue Pill

The Nedergaard lab at the University of Rochester has successfully treated spinal cord injury in rats using Brilliant Blue G, a food dye that operates by blocking secondary cell death in the cord.

Of course, there are about 50 treatments already that can fix SCI in the rat. As long as you haven't severed the cord completely, scientists have been able to get rats up and moving since the days when I used to study this. The problem lies with transfering any of these treatments up to humans, who depend more heavily on sophisticated pathways to manage movement.

Still, this turns rats blue, so that's something.

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