The Tissue-engineered Spinal Cord Grafted To Repair Injured Spinal Cord: An Primary Study In Adult Rats

Background: The repairing of spinal cord injury (SCI) has always been a hot spot in medical research. We have used multiple nervous tissuse to repair SCI, but less success has been achieved in functional repair of the injured adult spinal cord.Recently, much has been learned about the biology of neural stem cells (NSCs). NSCs isolated from the brain and spinal cord of both neonatal and adult rats reportedly retain the potential self-renewing and to differentiate into neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes. It is a kind of ideal materials to substitute lost central neural tissues. Interestingly, cell implantation alone failed to generate functional tissue, this may be due to cells lacking a three-dimensional substrate disperse rapidly and are not uniformly distributed across the surgically created gap. The use of a threedimensional scaffold may provide anchorage sites for cell attachment and cues for differentiation. However, the microenvironment of acute spinal cord injury may inhibit the appearance of neurons, mainly the NSCs differentiated into glial cells, few into neurons. The potency of NSCs-scaffold complex as a reparing materials to be challenged. In the study of spinal cord tissue engineering, there are lots of urgently problem, such as how to improve local environment, and how to induce NSCs differentiate into neurons.In the developing fetal spinal cord (FSC), endogenous NSCs multiply rapidly and differentiated into neurons phaenotype. Meanwhile, FSC could excreting high-concentration neurotrophic factor, such as BDNF, NT-3, and so on, can facilitate NSCs to differentiate into more neurons. FSC also can provid helpful proten composition, neurochemistry factors or extracellular matrix, to regulate propriospinal cellour reconstituent to a suitable proportion.Based on the reasons above, we implanted NSCs into polyglycolic acid (PGA) scaffold, subsequently provid fetal spinal cord extracts (FE) to induce cell differentiation, constructed a kind of nervous tissue complex, contain neurons, astrocytes, and...