On December 13th & 14th, 2019, sunny Spain was the place to be for doctors, surgeons, and academics from around the world who are involved in spinal cord injury treatment and research.
That’s because the Sant Pau Art Nouveau complex in Barcelona was hosting The International Spinal Cord Repair Meeting 2019 (ISCORE’19), a two-day conference “dedicated to recent advances in translational research in the field of Spinal Cord Injuries (SCI).”
Unique Access Medical powered by Verita Neuro was there, and our Head of Patient Services, Mr. Henning Kalwa, took the opportunity to tout our success treating SCI with the breakthrough surgery called Epidural Stimulation.
Combinatory strategies were, in fact, one of the major topics covered at ISCORE’19, with speakers from The Mayo Clinic and several leading research universities in Europe and North America discussing the various surgical interventions, neural-regenerative procedures, and targeted rehabilitation that are available to SCI patients today.
“Most of the talks were focused on breakthroughs in surgery, regenerative medicine, and the importance of extensive rehabilitation,” said Mr. Kalwa. “I found it extremely encouraging to see that Verita Neuro is spot on in terms of clinical treatments.”
Verita Neuro’s clinical treatments are of course spearheaded by Epidural Stimulation which, as many people now know, is the procedure that uses electrodes to connect nerve signals from an SCI patient’s brain to the spinal cord tissue below their injury level.
Since 2016, Verita Neuro and our partners have performed upwards of 70 Epidural Stimulation implants on patients from around the world, perhaps most famously on Ryan Straschnitzki. He is the Canadian youth hockey player who suffered a T2 spinal-cord injury in a coach-bus collision and was left paralyzed from the chest down.
Ryan received his Epidural Stimulation implant this past October, and the outcome caused quite a bit of a buzz among international news media, including headlines like “Paralysed hockey player moves his leg after surgery,” and “Hockey player takes first steps since deadly bus crash.”
The coverage provided Mr. Kalwa with quite a bit of momentum as he headed to the conference in Barcelona.
“Even before Ryan’s successful surgery, our work was generating a lot of interest in the SCI community, particularly among those involved with procedures aimed at reviving dormant pathways in injured spinal cords.”
“But in Barcelona, the attendees from the US and Canada, in particular, were interested in Ryan’s trip to Verita Neuro Thailand, and were very complimentary.” Added Mr. Kalwa, “More importantly, they wanted to learn more about our therapies and about potential research collaborations.”
Establishing more meaningful collaborations with international foundations and research entities was Verita Neuro’s primary motivation for attending ISCORE’19.
So even though the conversations in Barcelona were informal, they are another step towards creating long-term partnerships that will close the gap between research-based knowledge and clinical practice. Slowly but surely, these efforts are helping paraplegics and quadriplegics regain control of their lives, and that’s what Verita Neuro is all about.
For more information about Epidural Stimulation or any of our other treatments, please get in touch and a patient representative will contact you within 48 hours.
