Orange Alert

Turning to Aquarium Fish for Human Spinal Cord Injury Treatment

Posted on: April 25, 2017

Syracuse University associate professor of biology Katharine Lewis has received a five-year grant of $242,500 from the New York State Spinal Cord Injury Research Board (SCIRB) that will support her lab’s research on spinal cord development in zebrafish. By studying how zebrafish neurons develop their specific identities during development, Lewis hopes to inspire new, regenerative treatments for spinal cord injury in humans.
“To make new neurons from stem cells you need to understand how those neurons are normally made,” Lewis says of her lab’s research focus.