Dr Giles Plant currently Directs the Red's Spinal Cord Research Laboratory in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. The lab is purpose built to perform all aspects of spinal cord injury research from surgery, tissue culture and anatomical studies. His research concentrates on the theory of autotransplantation to repair spinal injuries. This involves the transplantation of cells into the injury site obtained from the same animal's body. This technique avoids any rejection problems encountered from non-self transplants. The cell types currently transplanted include Schwann cells taken from the sciatic nerve, which is part of the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS). The PNS has an ability to regenerate a large percentage of its axons, unlike the Central Nervous System which cannot. The regenerative ability of these axons is due mainly to the presence of Schwann cells which produce factors that initiate growth.

Another new cell type, which is used, is the Olfactory Ensheathing Glial (OEG) cell. The OEG resides in area of the CNS that is able to replenish its neurons throughout adult life. The OEG help to provide a permissive growth environment for the new neurons and for this reason the idea of using these cells to transplant to repair CNS injuries was born. The lab is involved with the first demonstration, in collaboration with Dr Joost Verhaagen (Netherlands), of gentically engineering OEG to secrete neurotrophic factors such as Neurotrophin-3, Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor and also reporter genes such as Green Fluoresecent Protein.

Labelling OEG with reporter/tagging genes enables us to track their course in the animal and provides details of their survival and proliferation. The increased secretion of the neurotrophic molecules is an attempt to increase the growth promoting ability of these cells. Preliminary work has shown this to be successful.  The lab is also studying the effects any regeneration has on animal behaviour - whether this regeneration is functional and the axons are able to innervate their appropriate sites. In addition, they are investigating the mechanisms involved in how OEG work - how they induce axon regrowth and whether they can myelinate axons.