University of Miami School of Medicine (Florida)
Damien D. Pearse, Ph.D. (Neuroscience)

Rolipram and Hypothermia for Cervical Spinal Cord Injury Repair

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating condition that currently affects more than 200,000 Americans, leaving them with life-long disability and, as no effective clinical treatment is currently available, no means of functional restoration. Although peripheral tissue injuries and bone fractures can heal with time, trauma to the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) often produces irrevocable damage and dramatic, persistent functional deficits. In an organ system incapable of self repair, acute prevention of injury-induced tissue damage is critical to ensuring minimal loss of function. Each year, spinal cord injury (SCI) alone affects 11,000 Americans, usually leading to partial or complete paralysis. To date, acute pharmacological interventions for tissue protection have been limited to the glucocorticosteroid, Methylprednisolone, a controversial treatment option that has come into question recently for its lack of significant clinical efficacy. It is thus imperative that novel therapies be elucidated and translated to the clinic for acute SCI management in humans to reduce a sentence of life-long disability for these individuals and its significant burden on the US Healthcare system. We and others have shown that mild systemic cooling (or hypothermia) post-injury can produce significant anatomical and functional improvements in both experimental animal models and in its limited implementation following human SCI (including the recent treatment of NFL player Kevin Everett). We propose here to further enhance the benefit of this therapy through its combination with an already clinically used drug, Rolipram, an agent that we have demonstrated can also significantly abate tissue damage and functional loss when employed acutely following SCI, a result which garnered major scientific and media attention. We believe that this combinatory therapy will provide a more effective treatment strategy that can be used alternatively to Methylprednisolone and that can be rapidly translated to the clinic for acute SCI management.