Reeve Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board: Armin Curt, M.D.
Armin Curt, M.D., grew up in Cologne, Germany, in a family of four children — with no relation to medicine. His parents ran a small textile manufacturing business, which exposed Curt early on to all sorts of people in myriad professions — a marvelous mixture, he called it. But what drew Curt to medicine was his ailing grandmother.
“She was nearly blind and barely able to walk because of bad arthritis,” Curt says. “I wanted to learn how to help her.” Curt went to medical school in Germany, aiming to become a general practitioner, but became fortuitously sidetracked by neurology and during a rotation in Zurich, he developed a fascination with spinal cord injury and recovery.
In Zurich, Curt set out to understand spinal cord physiology, and how that physiology changes in response to different types of injuries. He has since specialized in paraplegia at Balgrist University Hospital. Both a scientist and clinician, Curt is the lead of the European Multi-Center Study for SCI, a dedicated research effort to uncover innovative treatments for people with spinal cord injury.
A Historical Journey
Throughout his career, Curt has taken a keen interest in the history of SCI, in particular, its roots in World War II. To prepare for D-Day in 1942, the Medical Research Council in London, together with the allied forces, began thinking about how to care for the soldiers who were paralyzed from gunshot wounds — and they built the first SCI unit in England.
“At the time, spinal cord injury was a death sentence,” Curt says. “Soldiers either died acutely or due to chronic complications months down the line; it was just a question of time.” But over the past several decades, the field learned that people can recover from SCI. “We now know that these young people can get back to work. They can get back to their families,” Curt says.
Still, when Curt started his career in SCI, he was skeptical. “I figured I would only last a year because we were limited in what we could achieve,” Curt says. But today, he is part of a dedicated community of physicians and scientists who are helping people with SCI recover function and mobility.
“Once we understand the elements of recovery and disentangle which elements represent neural recovery and which represent increases in the individual patient’s skillfulness, adaptation and compensation as part of rehabilitation, we can better predict the degree of recovery a patient can expect,” Curt says.
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A Multi-Modal Approach to Treating SCI
Over the past two decades, scientists have not only begun to learn about the underpinnings of spinal cord physiology, but they’re also beginning to uncover innovative treatments to address functional repair and recovery.
Today, there are a number of options, from epidural stimulation and neuromodulation to medication and human neural stem cell transplantation to treat people with SCI. “But there’s no single intervention that can cure spinal cord injury,” Curt says. Instead, scientists need to take a multi-layered approach that incorporates myriad interventions to affect change.
“Now is the time for well-designed combinatorial trials to address complex barriers and enable neural repair,” Curt says. “We need to come up with smart trial designs that apply different approaches in a timely and coordinated fashion to amplify the effects that we might see with a standalone intervention,” — and that requires collaboration. Fortunately, SCI has a tight-knit scientific community with a vested interest in sharing data and research findings.
“As a clinician, I have very long interactions with patients over the years, and their needs, urgencies and wishes are very close to me,” Curt says. “I see patients who don’t experience major recovery improvements but who still lead impressive lives — and when patients recover function unexpectedly, well, those are always the best days.”
Dr. Curt is part of our newly launched Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation Scientific Advisory Board. It is comprised of senior and junior investigators from across the globe and in numerous scientific sectors and serves as a sounding board for the Foundation, offering innovative ideas and honest feedback as we search for the most promising research and development opportunities that will provide the greatest impact for community members.