New protocols that stimulate the spinal cord

The laboratory is composed of neuro-physiologists and neuro-scientists who study the mechanisms at the base of spinal cord injury and other neuro-motor disorders through the development and analysis of innovative technologies. The laboratory specifically identified stimulating protocols that stimulate the spinal cord in the perspective to allow persons with a spinal injury to restore motor and autonomic functions by using a more specific and effective impulse. The unmet need is to recover motor control and the approach of the laboratory in this field is completely new: multiple and highly varying electric input to different sites of the injured spinal cord. In the majority of spinal cord injuries, when the brain sends a command of movement, the physiological signal is lost at the level of injury. The peculiarity of the know-how is to deliver variable targeted stimuli to the different regions of the spinal cord. While the stimuli currently used in clinics are stereotyped, namely there is no variability among impulses, the technology used in the laboratory provides stimuli varying in both amplitude and frequency. These variable impulses work better because each neuron likely receives a message that is better tailored upon its own excitability threshold. So, the laboratory investigates whether any electrical and pharmacological strengthening of synaptic transmission in the spinal cord can facilitate weak descending input to coordinate the recruitment of flexor and extensor muscles in hind limbs, proposing a unique multi frequency stimulation paradigm that includes highly varying waveforms.