Paralyzed people may soon be able to walk thanks to NYC innovation and thats only the beginning

Helping the paralyzed walk sounds like a miracle — but it may soon be a reality.Over the last few years, New York’s largest hospital system, Northwell Health, has been developing bioelectric technology that allows paralyzed patients to move.Bioelectric technology harnesses the body’s own electrical signals so it communicates properly with the nervous system.A paralyzed patient hooked up to a bioelectric device can feel and even move.The hospital has already seen incredible applications.“We had a patient named Kevin … totally paralyzed from the neck down after diving into a swimming pool,” Northwell CEO Michael Dowling explained.

“Because of the technologies that we’ve developed at Northwell, for the first time in history, that patient can move his arms … When you touch his arms, he has a touch of feel, which opens up the possibility that, in the years to come, people who are paralyzed will walk again.”The eventual goal is for the device to be portable and simple enough to use that a patient can take it anywhere — instead of only using it in a hospital lab.Northwell is just one of many healthcare systems in New York making science fiction a reality.Earlier this year, NYU Langone became one of the first hospitals in the world to transplant an animal organ into a human and the first to complete a dual transplant that gave a patient both a manmade heart pump and a pig kidney.The kidney had been genetically modified to more closely resemble a human kidney. Lisa Pisano, the 54-year-old Langone patient, wasn’t a good candidate for human-organ transplants because she was battling multiple chronic conditions.

Doctors believe the dual transplant extended her life.Meanwhile, a number of New York-based startups are focused on improving the software and technology doctors rely on to heal patients.Midtown-based Tempus is compiling the world’s largest database of clinical and molecular data from diseased patients.It’s analyzing each patient’s dise...