From Wheelchair to Walking: Professor Geoffrey Raisman (1957) leads spinal injury research team to major breakthrough

Pembroke alumnus Prof Geoffrey Raisman (1957) leads the Spinal Repair Unit at UCL which has been working in partnership with Dr Pawel Tabakow and his team at the Department of Neurosurgery at Wroclaw Medical University in Poland. Together they have made what is considered to be an historic breakthrough in the treatment of spinal cord injuries.

For some years Professor Raisman’s team have been working on the development of a new procedure at the scientific level in their laboratory. This involves transplanting cells from a patient’s own olfactory bulb (which transmits smell information from the nose to the brain) into the area of damage in the spinal cord. Dr Tabakow’s team is the first in the world to apply this, with some of their own modifications, to the treatment of a patient in a way that satisfies the conditions observed in Raisman’s experiments.

The first patient to be treated has shown a degree of recovery of movement and feeling which has not been achieved before. Fundraising is now taking place to support the continuing neurosurgical work with more patients in Wroclaw and to allow the London team to explore improvements in the procedure’s technology.

Prof Raisman comments “I believe we have now opened the door to a treatment of spinal cord injury which will get patients out of wheelchairs. Our goal now is to develop this procedure to a point where it can be rolled out as a worldwide general approach.”

This research is the subject of a BBC Panorama programme, broadcast on BBC1 on Tuesday 21st October 2014 at 10:35pm and available for one year after on the BBC iPlayer by clicking here