Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it has established a formal Patient Safety Task Force, which is expected to improve access to and the collection of patient safety data. Atlanta's Shepherd Center and the University of Georgia have teamed up to form a new biomedical research program that could give hope to people with spinal cord injuries, head trauma, multiple sclerosis and other severe neurological injuries and conditions. This isn't the first time the two have paired up. University scientists have worked in the past with the Crawford Research Institute at Shepherd to study the likelihood that patients with certain spinal cord injuries could walk again. This new initiative will be focused on increasing that scientific collaboration, including funding new studies on prevention and treatment of diseases of the central nervous system.
Discussion already is under way to create a seed-fund program for new research.
Shepherd Center specializes in the treatment of people with spinal cord and brain injuries and is the largest hospital of its kind in the country. A Georgia genomics company is one of 15 chosen to receive a research award from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. Zygogen studies the genetic makeup of zebra fish, which can yield valuable information about which genes are involved in particular diseases in humans or which genes could be switched on or off by drugs. After publicly disclosing in 1998 that he was fighting Parkinson's, Michael J. Fox established the foundation to speed up the discovery of a cure for the disease. Parkinson's, a degenerative neurological disorder, affects an estimated 1 million Americans.