 To give you an idea about a third of the cases we see as a neurology service in the Vary Hospital are cases with some sort of spinal cord injury. So it is very common it's about probably 500 dogs a year here in Bristol. Treating spinal injury has these two major steps. One is to treat the acute face so the when the dog becomes paralysed so it could be surgery for realigning the spine it could be surgery to remove compression on the nerves so that's one set of treatment and second set of treatment would be in a chronic phase for those animals who have not recovered so they had a bad injury remain paralysed. One of the treatment that has become potentially very useful is to use cells from the nasal cavity from from the nose and harvest them from nose and transplant them in a spinal cord to help the cord to regenerate. The start of the process will be having a small biopsy from the nose which is probably a very small fragment of tissue that we then process and put in a dish and the cells will start to expand so there is a process of multiplication where the cells grow to reach the number we wish for transplantation. Our olfactory cells system or smell system lose its neurons all the time because they're exposed to air dust smoke and so on so we lose neurons in the nose all the time but they do regenerate we do keep our sense of smell all the time that doesn't disappear the reason for that is because new neurons forms in the nose naturally and they link with the brain all the time and to do this link they need supporting cells olfactory cells are supporting cells helping nerves to grow and make connection with the brain so that's the natural history of what's happening in the smell system but if you do take these cells out of their natural environment put them in a damaged region of the brain or spinal cord then they do carry on having this function of supporting nerve to regrow and what we're trying to do is the spinal cord is really bridging the gap the lesion gap that's been caused by the trauma so we put the cells into the into the lesion and hopefully they will help the nerves to regenerate you can see or you can detect an effect of the of the cells in a sense that you see a change in locomotion so these dogs can work better with the cells and regain some control movement of their legs now it's not a magic treatment and obviously not 100% of dogs who would get the cells get an improvement but we had enough success to show scientifically that this was valid and about 25% of the cases we transplanted in that way had some some visible changes with the naked eye on their gates and legs movements using these cells I should say has been done in humans as well but as a safety trials so it's only a very limited number of people or patients the way forward would be to try and improve how we deliver the cells into the spinal cord because it's one thing to inject them and show there's an effect another thing to then go into a person and how do you actually deliver the cells so they survive and are numerous in the lesion so there's a problem with how do we deliver them so of course when dogs get paralyzed they also lose control of their of their bladders and they're becoming continent which is a big problem and one of the method we've been testing in dogs to solve this problem is to use what we've got neuro prosthesis there are small silicon implants we can place on the nerves below the lesions if the lesions in the middle of the back of the dog can still exploit the spinal cord below the lesion that's there and it's usually fine and has survived it's a technique that's used in humans been used for 30 years in humans so it's not new but but it's one of the example where something that is working in humans has we've taken it from humans and then implemented it in dogs so it's actually the other way is the reverse translation isn't it so by putting neuro prosthesis small implants on the nerves you can so you do a surgery for that you can take control of the nerves that are remaining and are going to the bladder and it is very very effective and you can then with a remote control these nerves in different ways so so you can empty the bladder regularly which obviously prevents from having to do it manually pressing on the tummy of the dog which is a bit distressing for the owner or putting a theater into the bladder which creates infections a lot of the time so neuro prosthesis is a good way of exploiting the preserved part of the spinal cord