BAR HARBOR, Maine - Leaders in the field of regenerative medicine are at the MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor this weekend. They're taking part in REGEN2015: The research symposium, lecture series and two-week course for graduate students look at the ways regenerative medicine is giving new hope to people suffering from paralysis and other traumatic injuries.Jay Field has the story of one patient, a paraplegic, and the researcher who's helping him regain some feeling in the lower half of his body.
His keynote address to a room of leading medical researchers is still several hours away. But Dustin Shillcox has rolled his wheelchair up to a table inside the library at the MDI Biological Laboratory to give me a preview.
The story begins nearly five years ago, when Shillcox, who's 30 now, was driving down the freeway in a truck near his home in Green River, Wyoming. "And I had a blowout to a tire, and it sucked me into the median. And I got caught in the cable fencing and it caused the vehicle to roll over."
Shillcox, who wasn't wearing a seat belt, was thrown out the window of the truck. "I'm paralyzed from the T-5, which is right at your nip line down. I've got no motor function. It's a total change in your life. Not only living out of a wheel chair. Because you lose the sensation of your bowel, your bladder, your sexual function, the ability to control your blood pressure, the ability to sweat."
Shillcox also had a traumatic brain injury. He broke his sternum, shattered his elbow and fractured four ribs. Both his lungs collapsed. Doctors put a rod in his back and did other surgeries, and six months after the accident, Shillcox finally left the hospital for a rehabilitation facility in Salt Lake City.
Eighteen months later, he found out about a new research trial going on in Louisville, Kentucky.
"He actually came down to Louisville, did a few tests to screen him a little bit farther. And he was what we were looking for, so we called him up," says Dr. Claudia Angeli. Dr. Angeli is the senior researcher at the Human Locomotor Lab, a partnership between the University of Louisville and the Fraser Rehabilitation Institute.
In Bar Harbor this weekend, a big focus of the REGEN2015 conference will be recent advances in regenerative medicine, a field focused on stimulating the body's own ability to repair damaged tissues and organs, and one day, being able to grow new tissues and organs in a laboratory setting.
Dr. Claudia Angeli's research gets at the challenge in a slightly different way, "because we're using the intrinsic properties of the spinal cord, even after injury. So we know that below the level of the injury the spinal cord is still functioning as normal. It just kind of forgets what it used to do before the injury. So we're making it aware of all the signals coming in and it starts responding the way it used to."
"So here is what the remote looks like," Shillcox says.
"It looks like a pager," I note.
"Yeah, there's nothing much to it," Shillcox says. "So in my stomach, you can see where the brain box is."
It's a transmitter, implanted just beneath his skin, that connects to an implant on the lower part of his spinal cord. Shillcox presses the pager-like device up against the bulge above his belt line. "And when I turn it on, that stimulates my spinal cord. And I have different configurations, which allows me to move my left leg or my right leg."
It's called epidural stimulation. Shillcox is one of only seven people in the world taking part in this experimental treatment. It's helped him regain his bowel, bladder and sexual functioning.
"It's like such an emotional time because when everyone tells you you're paralyzed and will never be able to move again and then now to see the things I'm doing, it's awesome," he says.
"We don't know if this is the ultimate cure that everyone is talking about for spinal cord injury. But at least it's returning them to a greater quality of life and greater health," says Dr. Angeli.
Dr. Claudia Angeli and Dustin Shillcox will give the keynote address at the REGEN2015 Conference Friday (June 26) evening.