Sergio Canavero and his team, who plan to carry out the first head transplant later this year, say they have successfully repaired severed spinal cords in rats, using the proposed technique. In a paper published in the journal CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics, the team says the outcomes open the path to “a severance-reapposition cure of spinal paralysis”. Fifteen rats in whom the dorsal cord had been completely transected at T10, were randomised into two groups.
The control group received saline, and those in the intervention group received the polyethylene glycol glue that forms the basis of the transplantation procedure. After four weeks, the treated group recovered ambulation, and imaging showed disappearance of the transection gap, which continued to be present in controls. The authors say the experiment shows “for the first time in an adequately powered study that the paralysis…
