Stem Cells In China 2

If you can't beat them, join them. Medical practitioners in the United States are now using the experimental techniques developed in China to conduct more orthodox trials:

Now Wise Young, an internationally recognized expert in spinal cord injury, aims to address some of the problems associated with humans tests involving experimental therapies. He is spearheading a new project to conduct rigorous clinical trials in China and has set up a network of Chinese hospitals to test new treatments for spinal cord injury.

Young, a neuroscientist and director of Rutgers University's W.M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at in Piscataway, NJ, says the availability of the enormous Chinese population will drastically speed up the clinical trial process, allowing new therapies to be tested more quickly and cheaply. He hopes the network will ultimately provide a go-to testing site for large pharmaceutical companies with new spinal cord injury treatments.

The number of potential new therapies for spinal cord injury has blossomed in the last few years -- dozens of treatments have been shown to regenerate the spinal cord in animal models. But safely testing those therapies is a challenge. For one thing, spinal cord injury is a complex problem; patients often retain partial motor or sensory ability and may spontaneously recover some mobility after the injury.