Development of a turnkey system for assessing forelimb function in rats and mice.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Millions of Americans are affected by neurological disorders such as stroke and spinal cord injury. These disorders often result in impaired motor function and lead to significant disability amongst those affected. Despite major efforts to develop therapies to alleviate the burden of these disorders, virtually all promising preclinical therapies fail to successfully translate to the clinic. Reports from the Stroke Therapy Academic Industry Roundtable and the NINDS suggest that preclinical studies that eliminate outcome bias and ensure appropriate power would have a substantial impact on improving the predictive power of these studies, and consequently improve the development and successful translation of therapies. Current state-of-the-art preclinical models that evaluate motor function are exceedingly labor intensive, bear the potential for experimenter bias, and cannot reasonably be scaled up. Here, we propose to fully develop our novel MotoTrak system, the first hi