Cambridge Firm Launches First-Of-Its-Kind Spinal Cord Injury Study

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. For many people with spinal cord injuries, the word cure is one they hesitate to say. Some follow spinal cord injury research closely; others choose not to.

But one FDA-approved study upcoming from a Cambridge firm is attracting a lot of attention because it marks a major milestone in spinal cord injury research.

InVivo Therapeutics Corp. CEO Frank Reynolds. Reynolds was paralyzed for eight days in 1992. (Lynn Jolicoeur/WBUR)

Scaffold Study

Four floors up at One Kendall Square here in Cambridge, in the labs and machine-shop-like rooms of InVivo Therapeutics Corp., CEO Frank Reynolds hopes to shake up the world of spinal cord injury research.

This is our chemistry lab, he said while giving me a tour. So all of our chemical engineering is done here. Our hydrogels and scaffolds are all made right in here. So we invent, discover and make right here.

One of the products InVivo makes is a tiny, sponge-like device that they call it a scaffold. The company has received FDA approval for a safety study of the scaffold. The study will be small scale just five patients. But its a big deal for another reason. It will be the first time a device to treat spinal cord injury will be studied in humans.

The study subjects will undergo surgery to have the scaffold inserted directly into their spinal cords. The biodegradable scaffold is meant to do its work in six weeks and then dissolve.

If you visually picture a cigarette filter, you know, cigarette filters are very light, Reynolds explained to me. Theyre a little airy. Its shaped like that, because the spinal cord is round. Its a cylinder.

CEO Reynolds holds InVivo scaffolds, which will be inserted into study subjects spinal cords. (Lynn Jolicoeur/WBUR)

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Cambridge Firm Launches First-Of-Its-Kind Spinal Cord Injury Study