The May 24, 2004 issue of BusinessWeek contains a cover story and special report focussing on the "biotech frontier." Professor Richard Borgens, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mari Hulman George Professor of Applied Neuroscience had his work featured in a sidebar article entitled "The Geniuses of Regeneration." In the article, Professor Borgens' studies on manipulating faint electrical currents to effect tissue regeneration, with direct application to restoring some function to patients with severe spinal-cord injuries were described.

At Purdue's Center for Paralysis Research, Professor Borgen's research team induces spinal nerve fiber regeneration through the use of a very weak (thousandths of one volt) electrical field. This electrical induces and guides nerve regeneration in the two laned traffic of the spinal cord. Their results have proven this occurs in the adult guinea pig and they are in the process of developing an experimental treatment for paraplegia in dogs, where the polarity (positive pole/negative pole) of the applied field imposed over the region of injury is reversed every 15 minutes using an implantable electronic circuit. This is done to facilitate nerve regeneration in both directions along this nervous tissue "superhighway." What neurosurgeons like about this technique is that the electrical leads do not have to touch the spinal cord tissue, being secured to the outside of the vertebral column. Oscillating Field Stimulation (OFS) has already been proven to be very useful in clinical trials using paraplegic dogs, (the results were first published in 1993).

Future studies will pave the way for clinical testing and future human use.