Neural Stem Cells as Tools for Therapies: Challenges and Future Perspectives
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Pathology, Diagnostics, and Therapeutics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2026 | Viewed by 47
Special Issue Editor
Interests: neural stem cells; glycosphingolipids; neurological diseases
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The majority of adult organs still have a population of somatic stem cells, which may generate new cells for tissue homeostasis or repair in response to physiological changes or damage.
For a long time, the brain was thought to be an exception. It was generally believed that while progenitors for glial cells were present in the adult brain, new neurons could only form during embryonic development. Joseph Altman's suggestion more than fifty years ago that the addition of newborn neurons could occur in multiple regions of the adult mammalian brain, including the hippocampus, olfactory bulb, and cortex, challenged this dogma in the 1960s, but it was not until the 1990s that this idea began to gain traction.
We now know that the brains of mature mammals include a wide variety of neurogenic regions. However, the existence of neurogenic areas in human brains is more debatable; indeed, the amount of neurogenesis and the number of neural stem cells (NSCs) that continue to produce neurons in the adult human brain are still up for discussion.
For all of those reasons, illustrating the possible therapeutic potential of neural stem cells could be highly interesting. In addition to being a tool for therapeutic treatments, these cells could also serve as a paradigm for a fundamental scientific approach to neurological illnesses.
To better understand the disease and its course and to implement therapeutic intervention, it will be crucial to use NSCs in vivo and/or in vitro to study the molecular pathways involved. In this view, NSCs represent a good model for molecular studies. All works that demonstrate the potential applications and describe the molecular mechanisms of the disease or the molecular action of the therapeutic intervention in NSCs from various sources—human and animal, fetal and adult, and iPSC-derived—are welcome to be submitted to this Special Issue. We hope that our readers will gain a better understanding of this intriguing subject from this collection of excellent work.
This Special Issue welcomes the submission of original papers and reviews from fundamental and clinical science that describe molecular, cellular, and therapeutical aspects of this research topic.
Dr. Daniele Bottai
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- spinal cord injury
- spinal muscular atrophy
- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
- neurological diseases
- neural stem cell differentiation
- cellular models
- transplantation
- trophic factor release
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