Spinal cord injury work in danger of falling victim to state’s budget woes

Eric Anderson ofthe Times Union reports - “The state’s budget woes are being felt at the New York State Neural Stem Cell Institute, where scientists have been working to find ways to regenerate damaged spinal cords.

New York officials now want to use the funds that are collected from a surcharge on moving violation traffic fines and dedicated to research to instead help close the budget gap. Legislation establishing the Spinal Cord Injury Research Trust Fund provided that up to $8.5 million a year was to fund research into spinal cord injuries.

Sally Temple is scientific director at the stem cell institute, housed in the Cancer Research Center at the University at Albany’s East Campus. Grants from the trust fund cover about 20 to 30 percent of the institute’s activities.

“We would lose all of that progress that we’ve made over the past six years,” she said Thursday. “We have promising new treatments that would just die on the vine.”

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