The work, done by a team at the University of Zurich and the technical university EPFL in Switzerland, used 27 lab rats, severing their spines so that their hind legs were paralyzed.
“This is the World Cup of neurorehabilitation,” lead research author Gregoire Courtine said in a statement. “Our rats have become athletes when just weeks before they were completely paralyzed. I am talking about 100% recuperation of voluntary movement.”
The findings are being published in Friday’s issue of Science journal.
Seventeen of the rats were provided physical rehabilitation, while the other 10 were left alone as a control group.
As part of the training regime, the 17 rats were injected with a chemical cocktail that triggered cell responses. Then, the researchers used electrodes implanted in the spinal canal of each rat to electrically stimulate the spinal cord.
Next step: placing the rat in a harness that kept them upright on a treadmill — a way to jog their reflexes.
After three weeks, the harnessed rats were placed on a runway. Eventually, a piece of chocolate was kept at the end of the course to further encourage the rats to become mobile.
The “willpower-based training” did the trick, with the rats seeing a fourfold increase in nerve fibers in their brains and spines, said Janine Heutschi, a study co-author.
Courtine added that the rats were “not only voluntarily initiating a walking gait, but they are soon sprinting, climbing up stairs and avoiding obstacles when stimulated.”
The rats, however, still required harnesses to stay vertical.
Whether the electro-chemical regimen can ever cure humans remains to be seen, especially for people who’ve had spinal cord injuries that are the result of bruising — different from the lab rats, which had their spinal cords cut.
Still, researchers said that human clinical trials could begin in Zurich within two years.
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