How a Breakthrough Therapy Helped Two Paralyzed People Walk Again—Years After Their Injuries

By JAMIE DUCHARME 

September 25, 2018

When Kelly Thomas got the phone call that would change her life, she almost hung up. “I thought it was a sales call or something,” Thomas remembers.

But on the line was a researcher from the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center at the University of Louisville, offering Thomas a place in a trial — one that eventually allowed the 23-year-old Florida native, who became paralyzed after a 2014 car accident, to walk again.

The results of the study, which were published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine, are striking. Of four partially paralyzed people who went through extensive mobility training, two — Thomas, and 35-year-old Jeff Marquis — eventually regained the ability to walk with help from a spinal stimulator, potentially opening the door to new therapies for people with traumatic spinal cord injuries resulting in paralysis.

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From TIME