title: Advances in regenerative therapies for spinal cord injury: a biomaterials approach.
abstract: Spinal cord injury results in the permanent loss of function, causing enormous personal, social and economic problems. Even though neural regeneration has been proven to be a natural mechanism, central nervous system repair mechanisms are ineffective due to the imbalance of the inhibitory and excitatory factors implicated in neuroregeneration. Therefore, there is growing research interest on discovering a novel therapeutic strategy for effective spinal cord injury repair. To this direction, cell-based delivery strategies, biomolecule delivery strategies as well as scaffold-based therapeutic strategies have been developed with a tendency to seek for the answer to a combinatorial approach of all the above. Here we review the recent advances on regenerative/neural engineering therapies for spinal cord injury, aiming at providing an insight to the most promising repair strategies, in order to facilitate future research conduction.
authors.affiliation: UCL Centre for Nanotechnology & Regenerative Medicine, Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, University College of London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Magdalini
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tsintou
authors.affiliation: UCL Centre for Nanotechnology & Regenerative Medicine, Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, University College of London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Kyriakos
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Dalamagkas
authors.affiliation: UCL Centre for Nanotechnology & Regenerative Medicine, Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, University College of London, London, UK ; Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust Hospital, London, UK.
authors.forename: Alexander Marcus
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Seifalian
keywords: biomaterial; central nervous system; nanotechnology; neuroregeneration; regenerative medicine; repair; spinal cord injury; tissue engineering