ICES - PEMF RESEARCH PLANS 2015: diabetes, spinal cord injury, arthritis, inflammation, chronic pain, underlying cell signalling mechanisms Posted on 2 Jan 17:30

With the new year (2015) I have decided to open up our ICES research plans for discussion on a new blog.  Welcome!

This year I will be formulating several new research initiatives that are very exciting.  I have been invited by the US Army, under the CDMRP research program, to submit a full proposal to test ICES for possible benefits on severe spinal cord injury.  I have submitted the full proposal and should hear their decision in February or March of 2015.  If funded, the research will pay for a comprehensive study to be carried out by a certified independent industrial medical testing laboratory in Finland, to test the effects of ICES on severe spinal laceration.  The study has a comprehensive set of controls and is carried out at a GLP-level of quality, the highest standard available anywhere for scientific research.

I am also continuing my study of the effects of ICES on inflammation.  These were initially carried out by Charles River Labs (CRL) in Spring 2013, with very good results.  A summary of the official CRL report is available on my web page and is incorporated into the ICES Technical Brief.  I have improved the stimulation pattern quite a lot since this study, so it is possible that the effectiveness of ICES in reducing inflammation will be even greater in subsequent studies, which I hope to undertake this year if adequate funds become available.

One of my working hypotheses is that ICES allows endogenous stem cells to act more effectively in the tissue healing process in large measure by reducing the local inflammatory response.  This arises from a number of effects: enhanced stem cell engraftment at the site of injury, longer residence time, enhanced gene expression for stem cell growth and amplification in situ, and perhaps other effects yet TBD.  Endogenous stem cells, present in virtually every tissue compartment yet studied, are simply suppressed by excess inflammation.  So contrary to current expert opinion on the essential nature of inflammation to kick-start the healing response after injury, pathologic inflammation basically suppresses healing.  Many stem cell biologists will yelp at such statements, but I recall the days of the late 1990's and early 2000's, when I was studying adult stem cells in cultures of musculoskeletal tissues from *very* old animals, and I was stonewalled in my publications by the Old Guard who maintained that such stem cells simply did not exist.  We all know better then that these days, so its safe to say the endogenous stem cells are there and they are viable well into old age, and the NASA research using my original PEMF system from 1998-1999 showed very clearly that stem cell growth rate, cell colony density, and gene expression were all very significantly increased when the right set of TVEMF (PEMF) stimulation parameters were applied to the cells in culture.

With all that in mind, I plan to initiate a collaborative clinical study of diabetes, probably initially a clinical study of diabetic cats recruited from walk-in patients in veterinary clinics.  At the very least I expect to see improvement in the secondary morbidity associated with advanced diabetes, but I will also be looking for the unexpected: recovery of some level of the insulin response indicating regeneration of a population of islet cells in the pancreas.  These studies will be hands-off entirely for me so I am allowing myself a ray of hopeful optimism, as they will be conducted remotely by independent veterinarians, so it will be interesting to see the clinical progression of their feline patients during treatment with ICES directed toward their pancreas.

I have a new collaboration at the University of Houston to study the cell signalling of cardiac myocytes when stimulated with ICES.  We will be casting a broad net to detect calcium signalling in the cultured cells, among other things, to see if we can pick up intra-cellular signals during or after amplification downstream of the putative paramembranous receptors.

We are concluding the first phase of a veterinary clinical study of severe orthopedic injury, chronic pain and arthritis in dogs.  Generally, but not always, the dogs in this study are at a very advanced age.  Exceptions includes dogs with severe debilitating orthopedic injuries and pain from, for example, automobile accidents.  The initial results are promising and also revealing of a design deficiency in veterinary ICES systems: it is just too difficult to keep even the small portable ICES systems properly attached to active dogs.  So we have begun the second phase of these experiments in which the coil arrays are placed within or beneath the animal bedding near the injury site.  This allows smaller animals to be treated throughout the night without needing to wrap or otherwise affix the ICES coils to them while they are active.  The in-bedding system is concurrently being developed, so we hope to have a new veterinary product, the bedding coil array, ready for widespread sale by early-to-mid 2015.

As always, I am happy to share data, Ideas, and my plans with those who are seriously interested.