Repairing spinal cords via electrical fields.

• Position: Regenerative Medicine - Brief article

When a person suffers neurological damage to his or her spinal cord, the tissues surrounding the injury site can die, but one of the body's defense mechanisms is the regeneration and migration of a type of support cell--called Schwann cells--to the injury. Those cells, as has been discovered in recent years, help myeinate--or cover--nerve axons where :he injury has occurred, which promotes the recovery of some of the spinal cord's function.

Li Yao, assistant professor of biological sciences at Wichita (Kan.) State University, is studying how electrical signals can aim those cells directly to the injury site. His research, he hopes, will open new doors for the medical field to use electrical fields in the treatment of neural injuries. "Electrical signal is a kind of ignored approach that may generate significant biological function in neural regeneration."

Yao's research studies the...