On a lifelong mission to help a childhood friend, Tim O’Shea is working on a new way to repair spinal cords
By Patrick L. Kennedy
Ben Harvey was an active fifteen-year-old. He was a rower, a swimmer—one of the fastest in the state of Queensland, Australia. And especially, he played rugby. In his hometown of Brisbane, rugby is a passion, a social and cultural keystone.
Twenty years ago and just two weeks shy of his 16th birthday, Ben was playing in a rugby match when a freak accident damaged his spinal cord. The injury paralyzed him, altering the course of his life.
In a different way, the accident traumatized Harvey’s peers, such as his best friend, Tim O’Shea. It also gave O’Shea a new purpose.
“I’d always liked math and science,” says O’Shea. Growing up in a region rich in mineral resources, a kid with those aptitudes had a clear career path. “Becoming a mining engineer or a mechanical engineer was the name of the game. But after that event, I knew I wanted to go into biomedical engineering and do something that would help Ben.”
The Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) Research Foundation believes O’Shea is onto something now, and they’ve given him a grant to develop it. O’Shea is today an assistant professor in BME, and he has proposed a novel solution that enlists glial cells in an effort to repair the spinal cord.
For a long time, it was thought that glial cells served a strictly structural function in the healthy central nervous system. Because these cells don’t conduct action potentials, the way key neurons do, they appear electrically silent. But scientists now know that glia are highly active cells that help maintain healthy brains and spinal cords. When an injury to the spinal cord occurs, surviving glial cells are involved in the natural wound healing process, serving to isolate the damaged tissue and protect viable neurons. But while isolating the damaged tissue is important in the short term, it can actually get in the way of spinal cord regeneration.
What O’Shea and collaborators have created is a new, sugar-based polymer biomaterial with glial cell signaling properties. The material can be used to redirect glial cells, giving them a new mission in the event of a spinal cord injury. “These new injectable biomaterials enable us to modulate glial cell functions to effectively alter the nature of the wound repair in the first days after injury,” O’Shea says. “By generating this new glia-based repair in spinal cord injury lesions with the help of our injectable biomaterials, we are providing the necessary cellular support for regrowing neural circuits in a manner similar to what takes place in neural development.”
With $150,000 from the PVA, O’Shea will test this strategy and refine aspects of it over the next two years. He is assisted by biomedical engineering PhD graduate and undergraduate students who come from a range of interdisciplinary backgrounds, including engineering, biology, and materials science, and the project benefits from O’Shea’s own diverse training, encompassing materials science, polymer chemistry, and glial neurobiology. “The project combines expertise on multiple fronts to extend the significance of the impact our lab can make on this important problem,” he says.
The project also includes a nonacademic partner: Ben Harvey. A unique aspect of the PVA grant is that it requires someone with a spinal cord injury to serve on the team as a patient advocate. Being the very reason O’Shea went into this line of work in the first place, Harvey was the obvious choice. Harvey’s role is to provide the team with detailed insights based on his firsthand experience living with a spinal cord injury, and provide feedback on the priorities and goals of the research.
Confined to a wheelchair, with limited use of his arms, Harvey grapples with a host of physical and logistical limitations. “As a direct result of his spinal cord injury, performing those everyday tasks that we all do without thinking takes just that little bit longer and that much more effort for Ben than for the average person,” says O’Shea. “Ben has overcome numerous challenges to live a happy and meaningful life, and has a unique perspective on overcoming adversity and dealing with challenging problems.”
That perspective will be valuable for the research team to hear, says O’Shea. “We do research on a very molecular and pre-clinical level, where we’re working with animal models and making new biomaterials. But most researchers haven’t been exposed to the uncomfortable realities of spinal cord injuries and don’t have a comprehension of the whole picture of how it affects the individual.”
For now, meetings with Harvey have occurred on Zoom, but O’Shea hopes to fly his friend to Boston at some point, and by the end of the grant, the entire team will present results at a PVA-sponsored symposium.
“This is the only grant I know of where a consumer advocate is involved in the research,” says O’Shea. “It’s valuable not only as motivation but also to help guide the decision-making. Because you can read as much literature on spinal cord injuries as you care to, but it’s very different hearing about it from someone with that lived experience.”
Banner photo by Dana J. Quigley.