The breakthrough was made by Newrotex, a clinical-stage ­biotech start-up from the University of Oxford.

“Nerves are basically like a telephone cord – a tube with lots of little wires that carry ­information between your brain, muscles, and skin,” Professor Alex Woods, founder of Newrotex, said.

“If you experience nerve damage, from something as serious as being in an accident, to just cutting an avocado – the connection between your nerves is severed. This can cause chronic pain, numbness or even paralysis.

“The current gold-standard treatment that we currently have for nerve damage is a procedure called an autograft, where a surgeon will essentially harvest a healthy nerve from another part of the patient’s body to patch the injury site.

“But the problem with this is that we’re not actually creating a cure – because we have to remove a nerve from an area of the body in order to heal the initial injury, we’re simply trading the nerve damage in one area for damage in another.”

Autograft surgery has a recovery rate of less than 50pc and complication rate of 27pc. As a result, the “off-the-shelf” silk alternative could be transformative.

Spider’s silk is highly biocompatible

By eliminating the need for a second surgical site to harvest donor nerves, the technology reduces operation times, lowers the risk of infection and could significantly cut the long-term costs associated with rehabilitation and chronic pain management.

The innovative solution that Newrotex has proposed uses silk fibres from golden orb-web spiders to provide what Prof Woods describes as a “trellis-like structure that bridges damaged nerves, so that they can essentially grow back together”.

In preliminary tests conducted on rats, nerve cells latched onto the spider silk and migrated at a remarkable speed of over 1.1mm per day. Crucially, the silk remains in place for several months – long enough to support nerve regeneration over gaps of up to 10cm, which human nerves simply cannot do alone. “The thing is, spider’s silk is highly biocompatible – so two years after surgery, there’s no trace of any silk in the patient’s system,” Prof Woods said.

If future trials prove successful, the humble spider’s web may soon be the gold standard for helping nerve-damaged humans walk and move again. (© The Independent)