Abstract
Spinal cord injury (SCI) leads to chronic and multifaceted disability, which severely impacts the physical and mental health as well as the socio-economic status of affected individuals. Permanent disabilities following SCI result from the failure of injured neurons to regenerate and rebuild functional connections with their original targets. Inhibitory factors present in the SCI microenvironment and the poor intrinsic regenerative capacity of adult spinal cord neurons are obstacles for regeneration and functional recovery. Considerable progress has been made in recent years in developing cell and molecular approaches to enable the regeneration of damaged spinal cord tissue. In this review, we highlight several potent cell-based approaches and genetic manipulation strategies (gene therapy) that are being investigated to reconstruct damaged or lost spinal neural circuits and explore emerging novel combinatorial approaches for enhancing recovery from SCI.
Highlights
Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) can prompt debilitating autonomic and sensorimotor impairments, severely limiting the patient’s independence, quality of life, and socioeconomic status[1,2]
We have found that this neurobehavioral effect is lost when adult neural progenitor cells (NPCs) are derived from myelin basic protein (MBP)-deficient Shiverer mice incapable of producing functional myelin[61,62]
Our findings showed that biasing NPC differentiation along an oligodendroglial lineage represents a promising approach to promote tissue sparing, axonal remyelination, and neural repair post-SCI44,53
Summary
F1000 Faculty Reviews are written by members of the prestigious F1000 Faculty. They are commissioned and are peer reviewed before publication to ensure that the final, published version is comprehensive and accessible. The reviewers who approved the final version are listed with their names and affiliations. Any comments on the article can be found at the end of the article
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