Left: courtesy of Anthony Windebank; right courtesy of Christine Schmidt
To facilitate nerve regrowth, tissue engineers employ biodegradable polymer scaffolds. Shown at left, a micrograph of an actual scaffold used to stimulate spinal cord regeneration in rats. Center, a piece of neural tissue grows on an electrically conductive polymer used primarily for peripheral nerve repair (image colored for effect). At right, stained section of a peripheral nerve showing axons in red and myelin in green.
Despite advances in knowledge about the mechanisms of nerve injury and repair, regeneration strategies for peripheral and central nervous system (PNS and CNS) damage are still in their infancies. "Neuroscientists are very good at finding out, okay, this enzyme would work or this trophic factor would work, but translating that to a controlled application that will help lead to clinical translation is a different story," says Ravi Bellamkonda, a biomedical engineer at Georgia Institute of ...
