Spinal Cord Injury Research Facility

The Spinal Cord Injury Research Facility (SCIRF), funded by the CatWalk Spinal Cord Injury Research Trust, was established in 2011 by Professor Louise Nicholson, Dr Simon O’Carroll and Professor Colin Green.

Dr Simon O’Carroll is the Director of the Spinal Cord Injury Research Facility and a Principal Investigator at the Centre for Brain Research. Simon's research interests involve understanding the mechanisms of damage involved in spinal cord injury and developing therapeutic interventions such as those that modulate neuroinflammation and scar formation following injury.

Positioned within the Centre for Brain Research (CBR) in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, the SCIRF has the full support of the CBR Director, Distinguished Professor Richard Faull, and has direct access to all of the infrastructural support available within the CBR and the Faculty.

Over the past decade, the SCIRF has made significant progress on a number of specific research fronts, such as preventing inflammation by Connexin Mimetic Peptide delivery and treatment, gene therapy, and scar inhibition. This is exciting world-leading research that is progressing to clinical trials.

One of the primary goals of the facility has been to establish expertise and maintain spinal injury models that can be accessed by researchers working on spinal injury within the CBR here in Auckland and from across New Zealand, to maintain an ongoing research programme and further develop both local and international biomedical and clinical collaborations.

• Establish expertise in spinal injury models
• Maintain an ongoing research programme that further develops and supports international and clinical collaborations
• Develop ongoing leadership in the area of spinal cord injury research

• Spinal cord injuries
• Translational research
• Peptides
• Inflammation
• Viral vectors
• Neurogenesis
• Gene Therapy