Professor James St John is Head of the Clem Jones Centre for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research.
This Centre is within the Institute for Biomedicine and Glycomics at Griffith University, in Queensland, Australia. The Centre has 40 researchers who come from 19 different countries, and 60% are female and 40% male. James is a translational neuroscientist specialising in the creation and delivery of therapies to repair injuries and diseases of the nervous system. His three main areas of research are: spinal cord injury, peripheral nerve injury, and the role of microbes in neurodegeneration, with the major project of the Centre being the translation of a cell transplantation therapy to repair spinal cord injury. His expertise is in the biology of olfactory ensheathing cells, which are the glia of the olfactory nerve. These cells have numerous functions within the olfactory system which make them therapeutically suitable for transplantation into other regions of the nervous system. He has more than 100 publications in this field, with papers ranging from basic discovery research to translational research and therapeutic applications. In 2025, Professor St John is leading a Phase I clinical trial to test the transplantation of olfactory ensheathing cell nerve bridges for repairing chronic spinal cord injury.
SSN: What drove you to choose a career in medical research and spinal cord injury?
JSJ: My early background is completely different to my current research. I started my career in agricultural science and my PhD at The University of Melbourne was on carbohydrate metabolism in temperate pasture grasses. Despite my intention of continuing to work in agriculture, I was offered a job to work on how carbohydrates are involved in establishing the olfactory topographic map during development. In reality, while I was an expert on carbohydrates, I had little idea about the nervous system. However, this eventually gave me an advantage. Without having learnt the dogma about how the nervous system develops and regenerate, I came in with fresh eyes and crazy ideas. Some of those ideas did not work out, but others were highly successful.
My most memorable moment was when I started using live cell imaging to visualise living axons growing within a healthy zebrafish spinal cord. A select number of axons had been fluorescently labelled using a transgenic reporter, while all other cells were not visible. I could therefore watch individual growth cones on the end of axons as they navigated in three dimensions, with their long filopodia extending and retracting as it was seeking its path. But while seeing the axon move in vivo was absolutely fascinating, my curiosity was drawn to what I couldn’t see – the supporting glial cells of nervous system. So I switched focus from studying how axons grow to studying how the glia help neurons to grow. By using timelapse imaging of in vitro cultures of neurons and glia, it became apparent that in many circumstances the glia are the pathfinders while the axons often hitch a ride with the glia. Thus, to repair injuries of the nervous system I realised that the glia are the key to success. As an analogy, I often think about the spinal cord injury as a motorway in which a bridge has collapsed. The glia are the physical surface that form the bridge while axons are vehicles that need to traverse the bridge. To get the traffic to start flowing again, it is first necessary to clean up the damage and then repair the bridge. From that point on, my research has been to understand the