Our Story
BreakThru SCI was founded by our family after Clay’s cervical spinal cord injury due to a shallow water diving accident in August 2022. After battling through the throes of the intensive care unit and months of inpatient rehabilitation, Clay was discharged with fistfuls of prescription medications to manage the never-ending secondary complications from spinal cord injury. However, only one prescription was written with the intent to help heal the spinal cord, the same prescription that has been written since the early 1900’s, physical therapy. Like hundreds of thousands of other families discover, there are no FDA approved drugs for restoring lost function from a spinal cord injury.
After Clay’s injury, our family began searching for promising clinical trials, for we knew physical therapy alone was not enough to help Clay recover from this severe injury.
More than a year after his accident, Clay qualified for the NervGen Phase clinical trial at Shirley Ryan Ability Lab in Chicago. Participating in the trial changed how our family thinks about spinal cord injury. It offered a glimpse of what may be possible through emerging restorative therapies and reinforced our belief that meaningful improvements in function are possible.
For too long, people living with spinal cord injury have been told to adapt to a life with little hope of restoring lost function. Today, for the first time in decades, there are promising restorative therapies being tested in people living with SCI. That reality has given families like ours something many thought was impossible: hope. Yet hope without action cannot change lives. BreakThru SCI was founded to ensure that people living with spinal cord injury have a voice in the decisions that will shape the future of treatment and recovery.
At BreakThru SCI, we are fighting for a future where no person with SCI—and no family beside them—must bear being told that there are no treatments for their traumatic condition. We are fighting for a world where SCI recovery is not hopeless.
