Sabhya Rana
Ohio State University, OH·Neuroscience·Early-career
After a neck-level spinal cord injury, the nerve signals that drive the diaphragm, the main breathing muscle, are disrupted. Breathing complications are a leading cause of illness and death in people with spinal cord injury, so treatments that restore breathing muscle activity are urgently needed.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Physiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
spinal cord injury
cervical SCI
respiratory motor control
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2029
What they work on
- Develop an effective transcutaneous spinal direct current stimulation protocol that increases phrenic nerve activation after cervical spinal cord injury in rats, using controlled neurophysiological nerve recordings.
- Test whether pairing ampakine treatment, which strengthens signaling through excitatory AMPA receptors, with spinal direct current stimulation produces sustained increases in phrenic motor output.
- Test whether spinal direct current stimulation plus ampakines safely enhances diaphragm EMG activity in awake, unrestrained rats with cervical spinal cord injury.
- Test whether daily transcutaneous spinal stimulation combined with low-dose ampakine therapy promotes lasting recovery of diaphragm activation and ventilation after cervical injury.
More about the research
This work tests whether a non-invasive electrical stimulation method, combined with a drug that boosts nerve signaling, can strengthen and sustain breathing output after such an injury in rats.
Why it matters
People with cervical spinal cord injury often depend on weakened breathing muscles, and respiratory complications drive much of the mortality in this group. Because transcutaneous spinal stimulation is non-invasive and ampakines are drugs, this combination could become a clinically translatable rehabilitation approach to improve breathing in people with incomplete chronic cervical injury.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kristi Streeter
Marquette University, WI·Neuroscience
Test whether activating phrenic proprioceptors, the stretch sensors of the diaphragm, induces a form of phrenic motor plasticity mechanistically distinct from other respiratory plasticity, using in vivo neurophysiology in rats to probe spinal mechanisms.
Lee Miller
Northwestern University, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Build decoders that predict intended muscle activity (EMG) from primary motor cortex spiking recorded in humans with high-level spinal cord injury, trained with EMG, hand posture and force data from able-bodied people doing the same actions.
George Smith
Temple University, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether a human CD59–Thy1.1 GPI-anchor chimera, activated by the bacterial toxin intermedilysin, selectively cuts corticospinal tract axons while sparing neighboring neurons and pathways, using histology of immune response, gliosis and myelination.
The school
Ohio State University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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