Throughout his career, Jerry Silver dreamt of restoring meaningful function to the millions of people with spinal cord injuries worldwide. His commitment to groundbreaking research in neuroscience and neural regeneration combined with his entrepreneurial spirit brought extraordinary discoveries to help patients.
Now, the Case Western Reserve University community is mourning the passing of Silver, who died Jan. 7. He was 77.
“Jerry was a towering figure in the field of spinal cord injury and neural repair,” said Stan Gerson, dean of the School of Medicine. “His passion in research was to understand the basic molecular and cellular biology of the injured nervous system’s failure to repair itself.”
Silver made his mark at Case Western Reserve starting with his postdoctoral studies. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he joined the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine faculty in 1979, earning tenure in 1984 and later, as a founding faculty member of the new Department of Neurosciences in 1989. Despite being invited to consider multiple chairmanships or directorships in other institutions, Silver remained a CWRU faculty member for 45 years.
The impact of Jerry’s research to improve patients’ quality of life was remarkable. He single-handedly created a new area of research that found certain molecules inhibit neural repair and discovered ways to therapeutically manipulate these inhibitory molecular boundaries to promote functional recovery following injury. Most powerfully, he showed it is possible to regenerate neural connections for reversal of paralysis with protocols that block the inhibitory molecules or their receptors.
He was one of the first neuroscientists to recognize the crucial role of a large group of non-neuronal cells, glia, which were considered “brain support cells” in textbooks but are now known to play various key roles in brain development and function. He invented ADCON, a potent FDA-approved, anti-fibrotic gel, commercialized by Gliatech, that is used to prevent severely painful adhesions that can form initially after trauma or infection. Since its inception in 1995, ADCON has been used worldwide in over 400,000 operations, relieving the suffering of many patients.
Case Western Reserve recently licensed patented work from his second biotech company, NervGen, whose mission is to commercialize the Silver lab’s paralysis reversal strategy. This biopharma company is moving forward with human clinical trials with Silver’s regenerative peptide called Intracellular Sigma Peptide.
“Up until the 1990s, it was believed that the central nervous system could not be repaired or that it was even possible to help someone repair a spinal cord injury and recover from their injury,” Silver once shared when speaking about his work. “We never gave up. We persevered and overturned nearly a century of neuroscience precedence and what was believed to be settled science.”
In addition to being named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Silver was honored with prestigious awards, including the Christopher Reeve-Joan Irvine Research Medal for critical contributions that may lead to the promotion of repair of the damaged spinal cord. In 2004, he received the Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award that recognizes select National Institutes of Health (NIH) grantees who have made seminal contributions to their field of neuroscience, contributed exemplary service to NIH, and who show great promise for continuing their cutting-edge research into the future.
His legacy also will live on through his teaching and training of undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs, as well as teaching medical students as a Case Inquiry (IQ) program facilitator. His exceptional scientific mentoring resulted in faculty positions for 35 of his trainees at universities or hospitals throughout the world, including several who are department chairs or hold endowed professorships.
“Jerry will be remembered by the CWRU neuroscience community for his decades of cutting-edge basic and translational research in neural repair, his great enthusiasm for other research in the neuroscience department, his insightful comments and questions at seminars and thesis committee meetings and his unique humor. He was just fun to be around,“ said Evan Deneris, professor in the Department of Neurosciences.
Silver was lead or senior author on more than 160 publications with over 38,000 citations to date. He served on a number of editorial boards, including the journals Glia, The Journal of Neurocytology, Developmental Neurobiology, The Journal of Neuroscience, Scientific Reports and Experimental Neurology. He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Christopher Reeve Foundation and the Scientific Board of the International Spinal Research Trust in England.
Students who would like support are encouraged to contact University Health and Counseling Services at 216.368.5872. This line is staffed by a counselor 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Faculty and staff can access counseling at any time by calling AllOne Health (formerly IMPACT Solutions) at 1.800.227.6007.
Details for memorial services are pending and will be added to this article online when information is available.