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 A Conversation with Aileen Anderson
Assistant Professor, University of California, Irvine
Scientific Director, Injury Core Laboratory
What is the purpose of the Core Pilot Program?
The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation has done a number of things over the years to stimulate people who might not have previously worked in the field of spinal cord injury to move into this area as an application of their research. The goal of the Core Pilot Program is to take investigators who might be working on related problems in systems other than the usual models for spinal cord injury, and give them the tools to get pilot data in a relevant model. For example, an investigator working on multiple sclerosis might find that there is a lot of overlap with spinal cord injury in terms of mechanism. If he or she submitted an individual research grant proposal to the Reeve Foundation, the odds of having that grant funded are extremely low - many good applications come in that directly address the spinal cord as the focus of the problem, so studies that are based on other models tend to be a lower priority. The idea with the Core Pilot Program is to provide a way to get pilot data, in a quick test where the investigators don't have to spend a year setting up the model in their own labs. The hope is that the pilot data will allow them to assess whether the study should be followed up further, and also help them garner additional funding to support spinal cord research in their own labs.
How does it work?
The main activity of the Core Pilot Program is to assist investigators who have promising proposals for drugs or other therapies that might be relevant to spinal cord injury. The core will collaborate with them on the experimental design, considering factors such as drug dosage, timing, and the particular injury model required. Then we will perform the actual experiments in our lab, where we have extensive experience working with spinal cord models. Afterwards, tissues and behavioral data will be sent back to the originating investigator, who can analyze them to decide if the intervention had the desired effect, and whether there was an interesting set of mechanisms to follow up. The program will also make every effort to accommodate any of the participating investigators who would like to observe the experiments and learn about the protocols involved.
The Core program will also play a role in supporting some of the Reeve Foundation's training initiatives, where investigators without previous experience in spinal cord models can learn how to work with a particular injury model in their own labs. This will be especially important in cases where the pilot studies show that further research is warranted.
What are the practical benefits for investigators?
Animal models for spinal cord injury are very difficult to work with. To use them well and reproducibly and get reliable behavioral assessments, there are a lot of tricks of the trade - it's not something where you can buy a kit and do it reliably. The expectation is that these funding applications will be like any other grant application to the Reeve Foundation, but rather than requiring that the applicants are capable of working with these spinal cord injury models in their own labs, it will eliminate that aspect of what would go on in a proposal review.
Which areas of research do you think are the most promising ones for this program?
It's tough to say, because so much of science happens through serendipity. That said, there are some things that are easily identifiable where we know that a lot of the mechanisms are very similar - multiple sclerosis, traumatic injury to the brain or other parts of the central nervous system. For example, in the area of excitotoxicity or inflammation in the central nervous system and brain, but not necessarily the spinal cord, there are many elements that parallel the processes involved in spinal cord injury.
This is actually a major advantage for researchers because finding the resources for clinical translation in spinal cord injury can be a problem due to the small patient population. By having experimental results that might apply to multiple disease states in a larger patient population, it may become easier to obtain funding and support from pharmaceutical companies and other organizations.
What do you hope the Core Pilot Program will accomplish?
I hope that it stimulates people who have interesting data and who might never make the attempt to test it out in a spinal cord injury model just because of the difficulty of doing it. I hope those people come forward and we get some new directions and new possibilities for basic research as well as potential clinical therapeutics. You can have a really well-established logical rationale for a particular strategy and not have a good way to show the next step in terms of feasibility. Our hope is that the Core Pilot Program will facilitate that. As well, we hope it will allow people who are good scientists but who are not working on the spinal cord to take a piece of their lab and devote it to spinal cord research and applications, because maybe it won't be this drug that they have right now that makes a difference - maybe it will be the next one.
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