Olfactory glia and CNS repair: a step in the road from proof of principle to clinical application.

Abstract

Considerable advances have been made in the last decade in devising and evaluating cell transplantation strategies for enhancing axon regeneration for patients with spinal cord trauma, and in achieving remyelination in chronic demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Thus, a number of studies have established that transplantation of glial cells can have beneficial consequences in experimental models of spinal cord trauma and demyelination. In particular, in rats, it has been shown that implantation of Schwann cells or olfactory glial cells results in significant regeneration of axons across spinal cord transection sites and that this is associated with an improvement of locomotor function (Cheng et al ., 1997; Xu et al ., 1999; Ramon-Cueto et al ., 2000). A potential therapeutic superiority of olfactory glia over Schwann cells was demonstrated by experiments in which the number of regenerating axons …