About 550 million years ago, when animals were still in the early stages of evolution, there lived a creature who was the common ancestor of both humans and a fish species called lamprey. Lamprey is an eel-like jawless fish which has the capacity to heal its own spinal cord injuries, so is it possible humans can do the same?

A lamprey with a severed spinal cord is, like one would expect, paralyzed. But give it about 10 to 12 weeks, and no medication or treatment of any kind, and it will have resumed its full swimming behavior. Many of the genes that repair the damaged spinal cord in lamprey are also present, and active, in the repair of the peripheral nervous systems of mammals, including humans, a new study has found.

“Scientists have known for many years that the lamprey achieves spontaneous recovery from spinal cord injury, but we have not known the molecular recipe that accompanies and supports this remarkable capacity. In this study, we have determined all the genes that change during the course of recovery in the lamprey. Now that we have that information, we can use it to test if specific pathways are actually essential to the process,” Ona E. Bloom of Northwell Health’s Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, one of the authors of the study, said in a statement Monday. Read more …