Building a Global Network

Since its founding, the Rick Hansen Institute has served as a catalyst for collaboration among spinal cord injury researchers, clinicians, and individuals with SCI across Canada. Having led collaboration at home, RHI is now reaching out globally.

To accelerate progress in SCI research and care, there is an urgent need to harness the promise and potential of global collaboration. Greater collaboration internationally will cement existing and help develop new partnerships, identify and validate the most promising discoveries, and accelerate the translation of those discoveries into clinical practice.

Participation in a global registry is seen by many as one efficient way to obtain a large enough dataset to accelerate both the number of clinical trials that can be conducted, as well as the identification and adoption of best practices.

Through the establishment of registry sites internationally, and through increased collaboration on translational research projects, the number of clinical trials related to SCI can be increased, ultimately leveraging expertise, knowledge, and resources towards the common goals around scientific and clinical advancements in SCI research and care.

The Rick Hansen Spinal Cord Injury Registry

Since its inception in 2003, the Rick Hansen Spinal Cord Injury Registry (RHSCIR) has been an unprecedented living database, that is an invaluable resource for researchers, clinicians and health care professionals. RHSCIR collects and analyzes data from more than 30 major hospitals and research institutions, providing a critical platform to support SCI research and innovations. In Canada, RHSCIR collects information and data from approximately 85% of all new traumatic spinal cord injuries.

An initiative of RHI, RHSCIR fulfils the vision of Rick Hansen and Dr. Marcel Dvorak, RHI's Scientific Director and spine surgeon and researcher at Vancouver General Hospital, to offer a wide-scale, ongoing observational study of SCI data, which can accelerate the advancement of clinical best practices.

RHSCIR embodies a spirit of collaboration as researchers and clinicians collect and analyze data from people affected by SCI from emergency treatment of the initial injury through acute care and rehabilitation, and beyond as they move back into the community and rejoin family and friends. Such a system of sharing similar information from multiple sources moves research forward for the greater good.

RHSCIR is also a robust clinical research management tool that supports clinical trials through recruitment of individuals for trials and management of data from those trials. RHSCIR enables researchers to collaborate together on multicentre clinical trials and enables sites for these trials to be located in multiple countries.

To learn more about RHSCIR or how to get involved, visit the RHSCIR website.

Going Forward: Australia, Israel and the People’s Republic of China

Registry sites are being established in Australia at the Queensland University of Technology and the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, and in Israel through collaboration with the Hebrew University’s Institute of Medical Research Israel – Canada (IMRIC). In April 2011, RHI signed agreements with China Rehabilitation Research Center (CRRC) and the Peking University Third Hospital (PUTH) to strengthen cooperative SCI research and rehabilitation initiatives in China. The main elements of the cooperative agreements include shortening the discovery time for new treatment methods, developing a shared data platform and clinical trials network and identifying best practices.

In addition to gaining access to established made-in-Canada leading-edge technology, these new sites will be able to contribute to the development of best practices internationally, exchange data with global colleagues and ultimately, through access to a larger population of subjects for clinical trials, participate in multicentre international clinical trials that will lead to the advancement of new treatments in all parts of the world.

RHSCIR is considered a model for multicentre collaboration and clinical study management for spinal cord injury research.