It looks like we've been able to do it in a dish. We've grown spinal cord cells in a dish, we've made them become scarred, and we're able to reverse that scar in a dish. Now we move on to rats.
One thing that is very interesting: if it's successful, this treatment also could be amenable to treatment of multiple sclerosis, which is a brain auto-immune disease, where one's own immune system attacks the brain, and causes scarring. We would use the same approach to reverse the scarring, remove the scarring. This is one of the greatest challenges in central nervous system regeneration research. No one has been able to come close to doing it. It remains untouched.
http://www.ocregister.com/news/spinal-3 ... -cord.html
