Darek Fidyka became paralyzed from waist down after an attacker sliced cleanly through his spine in a 2010 knife attack but thanks to a breakthrough treatment by British scientists, the 40 year old fireman can now walk using a frame.
The treatment, which was discussed in detail in a study published in the journal Cell Transplantation on Oct. 21, makes use of the patient's olfactory ensheathing cells, or OECs, which help repair damaged nerves in the nose that carry smell signals to the brain.
The procedure involved the OECs being transmitted from the patient's nose into his spinal cord, where they enable the ends of the disconnected nerve fibers to regrow and connect a severed cord. This type of recovery was not thought possible in the past because a complete break is generally presumed to be irreparable.
The doctors implanted OECs into the 8mm gap in Fidyka's spinal cord and reported that the implant slowly restored the connections of the nerve fiber between both sides of the injury, which eventually led to Fidyka recovering some voluntary movements and sensation in his legs.
Doctors gave Fidyka less than one percent odds of recovery, but about ten months after going through the pioneering surgical treatment, he was able to walk again using braces and a walking frame, a recovery doctors dubbed as "more impressive than man walking on the Moon."
"We estimated that without this treatment, our patient's recovery chances were less than 1 percent," said Pawel Tabakow, from Poland's Wroclaw Medical University. "However, we observed a gradual recovery of both sensory and motor function that began four months after the surgery."
The charity Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation, which helped fund the research, said that Fidyka's improvements were more than what was predicted and he can now drive and live more self-sufficiently since the tragic stabbing incident.
University College London's (UCL) institute of neurology professor Geoffrey Raisman, who led the team that conducted the research on OECs, and colleagues said that Fidyka's is the first known case of a patient being able to recover from such chronic injury.
"Imaging confirmed that the grafts had bridged the left side of the spinal cord, where the majority of the nerve grafts were implanted, and neurophysiological examinations confirmed the restitution of the integrity of the corticospinal tracts and the voluntary character of recorded muscle contractions," the researchers wrote. "To our knowledge, this is the first clinical indication of beneficial effects of transplanted autologous bulbar cells."
