Without the scaffold, which is made of materials that will eventually be absorbed by the body, many stem cells wouldn’t make it across the divide. The scaffold tubes, each with a diameter twice the width of a human hair, serve as a guide for the cells to grow from one side of the torn spinal cord to the other. The new study focused on testing how well the scaffold design encouraged cells to grow across the gap and how well the scaffold material held up to give cells enough time to make the repair. The novel part of the new research is the 3D-printed scaffold, which is honeycombed with tiny tubes that function like highway tunnels keeping the new cells growing on a straight path, the researchers report in Nature Medicine. Mark Tuszynski, director of the Center for Neural Repair at the University of California, San Diego, and a neurologist at the San Diego VA Center.Įarlier research by Tuszynski and colleagues produced some success using just neural progenitor cells, which give rise to new neurons and also help create an environment that encourages damage repair. “This is a marriage of bioengineering technology with stem cell technology to generate what we hope will be an effective therapy for acute spinal cord injury,” said study coauthor Dr. Though the rats weren’t able to get up and walk afterward, they were able to move their legs in a purposeful way. In a proof of principle, researchers used neural progenitor cells to grow a kind of splice reconnecting severed nerve fibers coming from the rats’ brains to the lower parts of the rodents’ bodies. But a method that helps new nerve cells bridge the damage by growing through a scaffolding structure might one day change that, researchers say.įor now though, it’s only been shown to work in rats. (Reuters Health) - Patients with severed spinal cords once had no hope of regaining limb function.
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