The China SCI Network will initially be funded from an account set up at The University of Hong Kong. Over the coming year, we will set up a separate foundation to support the China SCI Network.

The goals of the network are as follows:

1. Establish a spinal cord injury clinical trial network in China, by coordinating the clinical trial activities of major spinal cord injury centers. The Network will provide funding to the clinical trial centers so that they can rigorously collect outcome data and carry out FDA (US) compliant clinical trials in China.
   
   
2. Train the centers to carry out standardized neurological examinations, specifically the American Spinal Injury Association or International Spinal Cord Injury Classification System. This will be done in workshops in March and October of each year.
   
   
3. Fund the Clinical Trials Centre at Hong Kong University to organize and coordinate the clinical trials. The HKU CTC will collect the data, site-visit the centers regularly to ensure that they meet criteria, and analyze the data.
   
   
4. Hold two meetings a year to train personnel in each center, to promote communication amongst the centers, and also for the centers to decide what therapies they want to test, and to design rigorous clinical trials. The second meeting will be the International Symposium of Spinal Cord Injury Therapies and Trials. The first of these meetings will be in Hong Kong and subsequent meetings will be hosted by one of the five other "nodes": Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Xian, and Zhengzhou (Henan province). More centers will be added as necessary and possible.

During the first year (2005), the network will collect data on 600 subjects with spinal cord injury (100 subjects per node). We will use this data to assess intra- and inter-center variability, to estimate the number of subjects needed to show significant results. In the second year, we will carry out one clinical trial randomizing approximately 1200 subjects to treatment arms that will be decided in October 2005 at the First International SCI Therapies and Trials Symposium. In the third year, we hope to expand the capability of the network, eventually to randomize 6000 subjects per year in four clinical trials.

In addition to training clinicians from each other of the Network centers, we will establish a workshop in Hong Kong where we will train at least one or two investigators every year to do preclinical studies in their centers. We would like the centers to participate in the entire therapy development approach ranging from animal studies to human.

Wise Young