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The 2024 Distinguished G. Heiner Sell Lectureship of ASIA will be presented by Armin Curt. Dr. Curt is Chief and Director of the Spinal Cord Injury Centre at Balgrist University Hospital.
Armin Curt’s research interests are translational research in human SCI, neuro-rehabilitation, clinical neurophysiology and neuro-imaging in human SCI. He is founder and chair of the largest European SCI Clinical network (www.emsci.org) established in 2004 and involved in early translational clinical trials. The network focuses on clinical recovery profiles and is establishing prediction models to inform the setup of interventional clinical trials and provide outcome thresholds of clinically meaningful neurological and functional assessments. Armin Curt is a scientific advisor and board member of national and international SCI foundations seeking to support preclinical research and fostering the translational path for the development of novel treatment strategies for patients suffering from acute and chronic spinal cord injury.
The Sell Lecture will be presented by Dr. Curt on the first day of the 2024 Annual Scientific Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 22-23. The G. Heiner Sell Lectureship was inaugurated in 1982, following the untimely death of Dr. Sell the previous year. At that time, Dr. Sell was the President-Elect of ASIA. The association wanted to memorialize him by presenting this named lecture as the keynote of its annual conference.
The 2023 Sell Lecture “Regenerating the Injured Spinal Cord: From Molecules to Man” was presented by Elizabeth Bradbury, PhD, King’s College London U.K. Dr. Bradbury.
Elizabeth Bradbury is Professor of Regenerative Medicine & Neuroplasticity and group leader of the Spinal Cord and Brain Repair Group at King’s College London, U.K. Research in her lab focuses on understanding the biology of nervous system injury and repair and developing therapies to restore function following trauma, with a particular interest in scarring, extracellular matrix modification and neuroplasticity after spinal cord injury. She completed a PhD in brain repair and neural transplantation at the Institute of Psychiatry, London and then a post-doctoral position at St Thomas’ Hospital in the laboratories of Stephen McMahon and John Priestley, where she studied sensory systems and neurotrophic factors as neuroprotective and regenerative strategies for spinal cord repair. In her second post-doctoral fellowship she collaborated with James Fawcett to study inhibitory factors in the extracellular matrix. This led to seminal work demonstrating that degrading inhibitory extracellular matrix with the enzyme chondroitinase could restore limb function to paralysed rats (published in Nature 2020, now cited >2500 times: https://goo.gl/WQSHft). Strategies to modify the inhibitory matrix to enable functional neuroplasticity and repair has continued to be the main focus of her research. She currently leads a dynamic programme of research with two main themes: (1) Translational research focused on developing novel therapies for repairing tissue and restoring function following spinal cord and brain injury; using advanced viral vector technology to deliver enzyme therapies which digest pathological scar tissue and enable engagement of dormant motor pathways and reconnection with target muscles, (2) Mechanistic Research into understanding injury and repair processes at the cell and molecular level, focusing on molecular mediators of cell death, neuroinflammation and tissue scarring; extracellular matrix and immune cell interactions; proteomics, biomarkers and drug discovery.
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