China Medical University Hospital in Taichung has joined the China Spinal Cord Injury Network (ChinaSCINet) to conduct experiments into the effectiveness of stem cell therapy in treating patients with spinal damage, hospital sources said on Thursday.
The ChinaSCINet project, led by Wise Young from Rutgers University, is about to extend the successful results in animal testing to human volunteers in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. The team has already proven that lithium and umbilical cord blood can be helpful in reconnecting the neural systems of animals with spinal cord injuries.
Young told a press conference in Taipei that in the first stage, they will carry out experiments on lithium medicine and stem cells extracted from umbilical cord blood to determine the effects of each therapy. In the second stage, they will combine the methods to study the effects on humans, he said.
ChinaSCINet will choose 400 participants in the Greater China region, including 60 from Taiwan, Young said.
Hospital deputy superintendent Lin Shinn-zong (
ChinaSCINet was launched by the University of Hong Kong in 2004 with the financial support of the university's SCI Fund.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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