ONWARD Announces First Patient Enrolled in the Up-LIFT Pivotal Trial Assessing Safety and Effectiveness of ARC Therapy for Spinal Cord Injury
12.1.2021 16:30:00 EET | Business Wire | Press release
ONWARD, formerly known as GTX Medical, today announced the first patient has been enrolled in a pivotal trial evaluating the Company’s ARC TherapyTM. The pivotal trial, known as Up-LIFT, will evaluate the safety and effectiveness of ARC Therapy in restoring hand and arm function in people with spinal cord injury (SCI). Up-LIFT is the first large-scale pivotal trial of non-invasive spinal cord stimulation technology. The first patient was enrolled at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, GA, USA.
“For individuals with impaired arm and hand function due to spinal cord injury, improved hand function directly translates into meaningful gains in terms of quality of life - being able to eat, dress or perform other day-to-day activities,” said Edelle Field-Fote, PT, PhD, FAPTA, FASIA, co-PI of the Up-LIFT trial and Director of Spinal Cord Injury Research and Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine.
“The start of this trial marks a significant milestone in bringing non-invasive stimulation to people living with spinal cord injury, whose top priority is restoring hand and arm function,” said Chet Moritz, PhD, co-PI of the Up-LIFT trial and Associate Professor in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. ONWARD plans to enroll 65 subjects at up to 15 sites in the United States, Canada, UK, and Europe.
A study recently published by Chet Moritz and researchers at the University of Washington in Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, a journal of the IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology, demonstrated ONWARD’s transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation leads to both rapid and sustained recovery of hand and arm function for people with both motor complete and incomplete cervical SCI. These findings further support the potential for non-invasive spinal cord stimulation technology in restoring hand and arm function in this population.
“The initiation of the Up-LIFT trial is an important first step toward delivering meaningful solutions to people living with the effects of spinal cord injury,” said Dave Marver, Chief Executive Officer of ONWARD. “We are deeply committed to our vision to use breakthrough science and pioneering technology to help the spinal cord injury community.”
An arc occurs when an electrical impulse bridges the gap between two conductors. ARC Therapy is designed to re-establish severed connections between spared neural networks and the brain by means of specific, targeted spinal cord stimulation.
To learn more about ONWARD’s ARC therapy technology and mission to restore movement, independence and health in people with spinal cord injury, please visit the newly launched ONWD.com.
About ONWARD
ONWARD (@onwdempowered), formerly known as GTX Medical, is a medical technology company focused on the development and commercialization of innovative therapies to facilitate functional recovery of people with spinal cord injury. Driven by a mission to restore movement, independence, and health in people with spinal cord injury, ONWARD’s work builds on more than a decade of basic science and preclinical research conducted at the world’s leading neuroscience laboratories. ONWARD’s ARC Therapy, which can be delivered by implantable (ARCIM) or external (ARCEX) systems, is designed to deliver targeted, programmed stimulation of the spinal cord to restore movement and other functions in people with spinal cord injury, ultimately improving their quality of life. Both of ONWARD’s technology platforms have been awarded Breakthrough Device Designation by the FDA.
ONWARD is headquartered at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, the Netherlands and the EPFL Innovation Park in Lausanne, Switzerland, with a growing U.S. presence in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. For additional information about the company, please visit ONWD.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210112005241/en/
Contact information
For general inquiries, please contact:
info@onwd.com
For media inquiries, please contact:
Laura Vinci, Finn Partners
laura.vinci@finnpartners.com
+14024998203
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Tangent Robotics Raises 4.5M in Pre-seed Funding to Advance Fine Motor Skills for Robot Dexterity30.9.2026 17:23:00 EEST | Press release
In humans, fine motor skills can take two decades to fully develop. Tangent Robotics, which today announced its pre-seed funding round, aims to speed up the timeline for robots. The company will use the funds to develop skilled robotic manipulation capabilities at the intersection of hand hardware, touch sensing, and motor learning, and deploy them in demanding manufacturing environments. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260930237631/en/ Tangent Robotics is developing fine motor skills for robot hands, which unlock the ability to perform critical tasks for what we want our economy to build locally, fast and at scale "Fine motor skills are hard to learn, and represent a layer that is currently missing in robotics but omnipresent in the real world," says Pedro Piacenza, Tangent's co-founder. "They unlock the ability to perform delicate, intricate manipulation. Tasks like assembly, threading, connector mating, gas
Blue Matter Launches Behavioral Science Center of Excellence to Decode and Predict Health Care Decisions in a Rapidly Evolving Biopharma Landscape30.9.2026 16:00:00 EEST | Press release
Blue Matter today announced the launch of its Behavioral Science Center of Excellence (BeSci CoE), a specialized capability within the Blue Matter Insights primary market research team. The CoE applies behavioral science as a strategic lens to decode the “why” behind the decisions made by healthcare professionals, patients, care partners, and other stakeholders. Biopharma decisions hinge on knowing why customers do what they do. Traditional research does a good job of capturing what stakeholders say but often misses the unconscious drivers, biases, emotions, and contexts that shape behavior. The result is an incomplete picture in the moments where clarity matters most, including when developing positioning strategies, planning product launches, and making major lifecycle decisions. "You don't need a survey to tell you that physicians see efficacy as the most important treatment decision driver," said Andrew Pilecki, Ph.D., Senior Market Research Director at Blue Matter. "What our clien
934 Embeds Bluefin Payment Security into Juno to Advance Secure, Connected Hospitality Payments30.9.2026 16:00:00 EEST | Press release
Bluefin, a global leader in payment and data security, and 934, a global provider of connected payment technology for the hospitality industry, today announced a partnership to integrate Bluefin’s payment security capabilities into Juno, 934’s hospitality payment platform. Hospitality businesses increasingly operate across connected payment environments spanning hotels, restaurants, resorts and other guest experiences. Behind those interactions are multiple systems, workflows and payment technologies that must work together while protecting sensitive payment data. Juno is designed to connect those experiences through a unified hospitality payment environment. By incorporating Bluefin’s security technology into the platform architecture, 934 can provide customers globally with access to PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE) for card-present payments and tokenization for protecting sensitive payment data. The result is a security-first approach in which payment protection is bui
Blackfuel Emerges From Stealth with More Than $250 Million in Contracted Revenue to Build a Global AI Token Grid30.9.2026 16:00:00 EEST | Press release
Blackfuel today emerged from stealth with more than $250 million in contracted revenue under multi-year customer agreements, unveiling its ambition to build a global AI Token Grid. Pioneering the AI Token Grid, Blackfuel is building a network of architecture-specific accelerator clusters connected through a common software and commercial layer, designed to turn dedicated compute into measurable, reservable AI output. By collaborating with AMD and NTT DATA, Blackfuel is developing its European-operated inference capacity, beginning with a GPU cluster currently being delivered in Europe. "The cloud was built around virtual machines. The next infrastructure layer will be built around tokens. We are building Blackfuel to become one of the world's defining AI compute companies, starting with our first deployments in Europe. That means bringing industrial-scale infrastructure, software and capital together so customers can buy intelligence with the same predictability with which they buy pow
Visioneering Technologies' New Contact Lens Trial Shows Landmark Results in Slowing Children's Nearsightedness30.9.2026 15:59:00 EEST | Press release
Visioneering Technologies, Inc. (VTI), a medical device company that designs and markets specialty contact lenses, will announce completed three-year results from PROTECT, a prospective, double-masked, multinational randomized controlled trial evaluating the company's NaturalVue® (etafilcon A) Multifocal 1 Day Contact Lens for slowing the progression of myopia, or nearsightedness, in children. Ashley Tuan, OD, MS, PhD, VTI's Chief Medical Officer, will present the full findings at the American Academy of Optometry's annual meeting in Anaheim. Myopia develops when a child's eye grows too long, causing distant objects to appear blurry, and it typically worsens through childhood. Faster progression is associated with a higher lifelong risk of more serious eye conditions, including retinal detachment and myopic maculopathy, a leading cause of permanent vision loss. Slowing that progression, even modestly, is considered clinically meaningful.3,4 Over three years, children who wore NaturalVu
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom