Researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have leveraged bioinformatics to identify a potential new treatment for spinal cord injury (SCI). Using a computational platform to match gene expression patterns linked to neural regeneration with thousands of known drugs, the team identified thiorphan, the active metabolite in the drug racecadotril for treating gastrointestinal disorders, as a promising candidate for restoring function after SCI. The research is published in the journal Nature .

“We were very happy to see that a drug that worked on cells in culture also showed effectiveness in an actual animal model of spinal cord injury,” said first author Erna van Niekerk, PhD, an assistant project scientist in the Department of Neurosciences at UCSD

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