The breakthrough was made by Newrotex, a clinical-stage \u00adbiotech start-up from the University of Oxford.<\/p>\n
\u201cNerves are basically like a telephone cord \u2013 a tube with lots of little wires that carry \u00adinformation between your brain, muscles, and skin,\u201d Professor Alex Woods, founder of Newrotex, said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you experience nerve damage, from something as serious as being in an accident, to just cutting an avocado \u2013 the connection between your nerves is severed. This can cause chronic pain, numbness or even paralysis.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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\u2019s body to patch the injury site.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the problem with this is that we\u2019re not actually creating a cure \u2013 because we have to remove a nerve from an area of the body in order to heal the initial injury, we\u2019re simply trading the nerve damage in one area for damage in another.\u201d<\/p>\n
Autograft surgery has a recovery rate of less than 50pc and complication rate of 27pc. As a result, the \u201coff-the-shelf\u201d silk alternative could be transformative.<\/p>\n
Spider\u2019s silk is highly biocompatible<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The innovative solution that Newrotex has proposed uses silk fibres from golden orb-web spiders to provide what Prof Woods describes as a \u201ctrellis-like structure that bridges damaged nerves, so that they can essentially grow back together\u201d.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 long enough to support nerve regeneration over gaps of up to 10cm, which human nerves simply cannot do alone. \u201cThe thing is, spider\u2019s silk is highly biocompatible \u2013 so two years after surgery, there\u2019s no trace of any silk in the patient\u2019s system,\u201d Prof Woods said.<\/p>\n
If future trials prove successful, the humble spider\u2019s web may soon be the gold standard for helping nerve-damaged humans walk and move again. (\u00a9 The Independent)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The breakthrough was made by Newrotex, a clinical-stage \u00adbiotech start-up from the University of Oxford. \u201cNerves are basically…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295555,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82,51264],"class_list":["post-295554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-the-independent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}