Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies for Cervical Spinal Cord Injury
Stanford Partnership for Spinal Cord Injury and Repair, Department of Neurosurgery, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive Stanford, California, CA 94305, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Wenbin Deng
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2016, 17(4), 530; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms17040530
Received: 11 February 2016
/
Revised: 17 March 2016
/
Accepted: 28 March 2016
/
Published: 9 April 2016
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Pluripotent Stem Cell Technology for Disease Modeling, Drug Discovery and Regenerative Medicine)
Cervical-level injuries account for the majority of presented spinal cord injuries (SCIs) to date. Despite the increase in survival rates due to emergency medicine improvements, overall quality of life remains poor, with patients facing variable deficits in respiratory and motor function. Therapies aiming to ameliorate symptoms and restore function, even partially, are urgently needed. Current therapeutic avenues in SCI seek to increase regenerative capacities through trophic and immunomodulatory factors, provide scaffolding to bridge the lesion site and promote regeneration of native axons, and to replace SCI-lost neurons and glia via intraspinal transplantation. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are a clinically viable means to accomplish this; they have no major ethical barriers, sources can be patient-matched and collected using non-invasive methods. In addition, the patient’s own cells can be used to establish a starter population capable of producing multiple cell types. To date, there is only a limited pool of research examining iPSC-derived transplants in SCI—even less research that is specific to cervical injury. The purpose of the review herein is to explore both preclinical and clinical recent advances in iPSC therapies with a detailed focus on cervical spinal cord injury.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
spinal cord injury; cervical; iPSC; induced pluripotent stem cell; embryonic stem cell; intraspinal transplantation
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Doulames, V.M.; Plant, G.W. Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies for Cervical Spinal Cord Injury. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2016, 17, 530. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms17040530
AMA Style
Doulames VM, Plant GW. Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies for Cervical Spinal Cord Injury. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2016; 17(4):530. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms17040530
Chicago/Turabian StyleDoulames, Vanessa M., and Giles W. Plant. 2016. "Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies for Cervical Spinal Cord Injury" International Journal of Molecular Sciences 17, no. 4: 530. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms17040530
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
