Congratulations to Dr. Bethany Kondiles (Postdoctoral Fellow as of August 1, 2025 in Dr. Kip Kramer’s lab) who was awarded a 2 year Craig H Neilsen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to support her research project entitled “PRECiSe-SCI: Pre-clinical Research to Enhance Clinical Success in Spinal Cord Injury”
Decades of efforts to find cures for spinal cord injury (SCI) have resulted in few treatments to restore function. Many interventions show promise in laboratories but fail to translate to significant improvements when tested in clinical trials. This project arises from my belief that improving preclinical research methodology will greatly improve our search for treatments for SCI. I will disambiguate the disconnect between preclinical success and clinical failure. I will use data science and machine learning tools to aggregate and analyze the preclinical data that establishes efficacy for interventions being tested in clinical trials. I hypothesize that I will detect preclinical data characteristics that predict clinical trial features or outcomes, even in absence of statistically significant functional improvement. By capitalizing on machine learning’s ability to find patterns in large datasets I may find patterns in preclinical data that relate to clinical trial characteristics. For example, key features of preclinical data might predict small positive effect sizes in clinical trials, which may fail to reach clinical significance, but represent biological changes and improvements in quality of life. This analysis will give insight into current preclinical approaches, revealing areas for improvement or strengths to exploit. The models and tools will be forward looking, able to incorporate new published data as new interventions are discovered and tested. Iwill build an interactive web tool, SCI Data Path, which will allow people living with SCI to view summaries of the preclinical data for interventions in SCI trials.