Back(s) to Life

Five years ago, Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Nicholas Theodore brought a problem with echoes of the movie Groundhog Day to biomedical engineer Amir Manbachi, who was then teaching in the Undergraduate Design Team program at the Whiting School.

An expert in spinal cord injuries, Theodore was frank in noting that no significant new drugs or treatments had been developed over the previous half a century. In spinal cord injury repair, he told Manbachi and his students, surgeons are still doing “the same rudimentary things that we’ve been doing for 50 years.”

In the aftermath of an injury, they open up a patient and “decompress” the spinal cord, clearing out stray pieces of bone and pockets of hematoma to stabilize the spine. After surgery, they monitor blood pressure very carefully, tinkering frequently in an effort to reduce the risk of dangerous secondary injuries. Otherwise, however, the treatment regimen is mostly a matter of helping patients adjust to new realities marked by pain and paralysis. …