First Human Spinal Cord Transplant Performed in Russia — SkimNews
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- Xiaoping Ren led the surgery at the Sklifosovsky Institute for Emergency Medicine in Moscow on an adult whose complete spinal cord injury from external trauma occurred three years earlier; the team replaced the damaged segment with tissue from a brain-dead donor and said the patient is doing well.
- The procedure used polyethylene glycol (PEG) as a biological glue alongside microsurgical techniques to fuse the ends of the donor segment to the recipient's own spinal cord — the same fusion approach Ren and collaborator Sergio Canavero have explored in animal studies.
- Sergio Canavero at Harbin Medical University in Heilongjiang province called the surgery "a Sputnik moment for spinal cord injury" and has previously co-published with Ren on the potential for spinal cord transplants in people.
- Melissa Andrews at the University of Southampton said the patient "will likely be much worse off" after the procedure, warned of a high risk of infection, and stated that the chance of regeneration and functional recovery "would be, in my opinion, zero."
- Andrew Jackson at Newcastle University noted that researchers typically use stem cells to encourage nerve fibre growth because "it is very difficult to get two adult pieces of nervous system to join together in a functional way," and urged rapid peer review of supporting evidence.
- Prior animal work by Michael Lebenstein-Gumovski at the Sklifosovsky Institute and others showed some recovery of movement in mice, dogs, and pigs using the PEG technique, though reconnecting a freshly severed cord differs from repairing an injury three years old or integrating a transplanted segment.
- Ren said the patient was informed of every potential risk and that the Russian team "will later release a document describing the surgery," though no peer-reviewed evidence has been published.
Why it matters: The surgery bypasses standard peer review and was performed on a patient three years post-injury — a scenario researchers say animal models never tested. If the PEG fusion fails to restore neural connections, the patient bears the cost of a major procedure with no functional benefit, and the credibility of Canavero and Ren's broader spinal-fusion research program faces a credibility reckoning the neuroscience community has long questioned.
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