They Were Paralyzed. Then They Joined a Peptide Trial.

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Consensus is that there is no treatment that restores function after spinal cord injury. The body is good at healing skin, bone and liver. It is famously bad at healing nerves.

I spent forty minutes with people who were in NervGen’s latest trial of NVG-291. Some received the peptide. Some received placebo. What follows is not the trial result, and it is not me telling you the drug works. It is what they lived, in their own words.

I've written at length about why this compound interests me. After injury, scars fill with CSPGs. A CSPG binds a receptor on the axon called PTPσ, and the message it delivers is stop growing. NVG-291 is a 35-amino-acid sequence, half of it borrowed from HIV's TAT segment so it can walk through the cell membrane, shaped like the internal part of PTPσ that passes that message inward. It jams the relay. The receptor still sits there. CSPG still docks. The message no longer goes through, and the axon's own growth programme, which was never lost, switches back on.

My full thesis is here: NervGen: Chasing Ozempic for the Nervous System. The short version is that GLP-1 became a trillion-dollar category because it hit the core proteomic node of metabolism. I think each foundational layer of the body has one such node. The CSPG/PTPσ brake may be the nervous system's.

But that is my thesis. This video isn’t about my thesis.

One of the people you’ll hear from was on placebo. He didn’t recover; he watched others around him and wants back on the drug. I want that distinction to be plain, because in a conversation like this hope and evidence sound identical, and they are not.

NVG-291 is investigational. It is not approved by any regulator. I hold no position in NervGen. Nothing here is medical or financial advice.

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