Spinal cord tissue engineering

Bioactive polymer nanocomposites for spinal cord tissue engineering... 

Heteroatom biodegradable and electrically conducting polymers, (IV), effective for tissue engineering applications were prepared by Schmidt [4] and used in spinal cord regeneration, wound healing, and bone repair. 

Neural tissue repair in order to treat nerve damage or neuropathy arising from a spinal cord or cerebral injury essentially requires the intervention of tissue engineering because axons are unable to regenerate on their own. Hence, recent advances in neural tissue engineering provide suitable and promising substitutes... 

We have already considered one application of living system utilization in medicine, where genetically engineered anaerobic bacterial spores seek ont cancerous tissue (see Example 6.15.1). In another application, multiple sclerosis (MS) can be helped by transplanting cells from one part of the body to another (Thieme, 2001a). MS is the resnlt of the destruction of myelin sheaths around nerves in the brain and spinal cord. This slows the conduction of impulses greatly (see Section 4.4.3). Schwann cells taken from the limbs of patients and injected into MS-affected areas can produce new myelin and reverse the most devastating aspects of the disease. 

EPCs have been reported to play an important role for pathophysiological neovascularization in various ischemic tissues, and they also have the therapeutic potential to facilitate tissue repair/regeneration and modulate the regenerating environment. We confirmed that bone marrow-derived EPCs may craitribute to the tissue repair by augmenting neovascularization following spinal cord injury, thus we think that these cells can be applied to the ligament tissue engineering in the future [53]. 

To summarise, a tissue engineering device for repair and regeneration of spinal cord nerves will consist of two components stem cells which are in an advanced state of development and scaffold, which is yet to be developed. The aim of this program is to design and develop the reqnired scaffold. The design stage will be preceded by research to establish the principal design parameters which are not yet known. 

This review highlights current tissue engineering and novel therapeutic approaches to axonal regeneration following spinal cord injury. An important role in creation of functional, biological scaffolds for tissue engineering play theirs stiffness, thermostability, porosity and dielectric properties. 

Yoshii, S., Ito, S., Sima, M., Taniguchi, A., and Akagi, M. (2009). Functional restoration of rabbit spinal cord using collagen-filament scaffold. Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine i, 19-25. 

Lavik, E., Teng, Y.D., Zurakowski, D., Qu, X., Snyder, E., and Langer, R., Functional recovery following spinal cord hemisection mediated by a unique polymer scaffold seeded with neural stem cells. Materials Research Society Symposium Proceedings 662 (Biomaterials for Drug Delivery and Tissue Engineering), 001.2/1-001.2/5,2001. 

Ob, JS, Ha, Y, An, SS, Kban, M, Pennant, WA, Kim, HJ, Yoon do, H, Lee, M, and Kim, KN. 2010. Hypoxia-preconditioned adipose tissue-derived mesenchymal stem ceU increase tbe survival and gene expression of engineered neural stem cells in a spinal cord injury model. Neuroscience Letters... 

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