Dr. Michael Lebenstein-Gumovski, PhD is Senior Scientific Officer and Neurosurgeon, in the Neurosurgery Department, of the Sklifosovsky Clinical and Research Institute for Emergency Medicine, Moscow, Russian Federation (https://sklif.mos.ru/), where his team is engaged in both neurosurgical and experimental practice, conducting advanced research in the field of spinal cord injury restoration, spinal cord transplantation and head transplantation.
Since 2013, Dr. Lebenstein-Gumovski has been studying spinal cord injury, and also developing methods for restoring the full functional and morphological repair of the spinal cord.
Dr. Lebenstein-Gumovski’s work is aimed at studying the effect of fusogens on nervous tissue, developing new methods and techniques for treating spinal cord injury, developing methods for its resection and transplantation. The lab develops and studies various methods of neuroprotection, combining methods to achieve better results and the current focus is the study of combination fusogen-induced (PEG-chitosan, Neuro-PEG) axonal restoration of the spinal cord after its complete transection.
SSN: What drove you to choose a career in spinal research?
M L-G: Neurosurgery has always attracted me because of its breadth and complexity. We work with blood vessels, tumors, bone, and infections. We work with the organ that, in many respects, defines us as human beings—the brain—and with the structures that govern the body: the spinal cord and peripheral nerves. That combination is endlessly fascinating.
As for the specific problem my team and I study, neurosurgery still contains several central challenges that are often described as “unsolvable.” Spinal cord injury is one of them. In my view, this is not because neurosurgeons lack technical skill, but because surgical practice has too often been separated from neurobiology. For many years, restoration of neural tissue was considered impossible, until the mechanisms of axonal growth and neuroplastic remodelling were identified and began to be understood. I kept asking myself why, despite the existence of regenerative mechanisms, the spinal cord remained so resistant to restoration. The answer “it is impossible” never satisfied me. I felt that a different perspective, and a fundamentally different approach, were needed. Hundreds of thousands of spinal column and spinal cord injuries occur worldwide every year, and behind that statistic are individual human tragedies.
At the same time, as a student, I read the work of Robert White and Vladimir Demikhov on head transplantation, where the central obstacle was also the inability to restore a transected spinal cord. My compatriot, the science-fiction writer Alexander Belyaev, wrote a novel about head transplantation more than a century ago; in our country, it was familiar to almost every schoolchild. Of course, I was not pursuing head transplantation as a practical objective at that time. But I did understand that solving the spinal cord problem could, in principle, transform even the most radical questions in neurosurgery.
A certain degree of ambition, a healthy sci