BIOMARKER DISCOVERY AND USE IN SPINAL CORD INJURY PATIENTS: IDENTIFYING NEW TREATMENT TARGETS AND MARKERS FOR PREDICTING CLINICAL OUTCOME

Morgan Godwin, Sharon Owen, Charlotte Hulme, Mateus Bernardo-Harrington, Joy Chowdhury, Aheed Osman, Srinivasa Budithi, Naveen Kumar, Paul Cool and Karina Wright

Funded by the Orthopaedic Institute, the Midlands Centre for Spinal Injuries and Keele University

The spinal studies team has continued its work on identifying potential biomarkers in the bloods of patients following a spinal cord injury (SCI) in order to assist in the prediction of clinical outcomes. We have now published multiple studies looking at plasma samples from SCI patients which have identified biologically relevant candidate biomarkers for the prediction of clinical outcomes. This work has implicated the liver as playing a role in the outcomes of patients post-injury.

Once a series of biomarkers has been identified as relevant to spinal cord patient outcomes, an investigation into the roles of the markers can be conducted, specifically focusing on their roles in humans and mice injury environments. This will feed into a cell model of spinal injuries being developed. This cell model uses mouse neuronal cells derived from the spinal cords of naïve mice. These cells can then be grown into cultures where injuries can be introduced, which can be used as a simplified, controlled version of spinal injury. This work initially involves establishing and optimising the culturing process. The first cultures from this work have been stained for neuronal cells (nuclei, astrocytes, neurones and microglial cells, see picture insert).

We aim to send samples from spinal injury patients to UCL to be analysed by the NULISAseq. This technique can detect over 100 central nervous system (CNS) markers, while only using a small sample volume and can detect low levels of these markers. We hope this large panel of markers will combine with our previous work to allow for an extensive search of CNS markers linked to spinal cord injury outcomes.