Promising Step Taken in Iran towards Treatment of Spinal Cord Injury | WPN World People News

Many people across the world suffer from injuries on their spinal cord due to diseases or accidents. Neural cell tissues are not able to recover the injury by themselves. Therefore, it is necessary to produce cellular engineered structures to cure neural injuries.

This research tries to study the ability of mesenchymal stem cells of human bone marrow to convert into cells similar to motor nerve cells. Motor nerve cells transfer movement order from the spinal cord to the muscles.

Nano-sized electrospun gelatin has been used in this study as a scaffold to culture stem cells. Gelatin is considered as an appropriate option in tissue engineering for the treatment of neural injuries due to its structural similarity to in-vivo matrix protein parts.

Results showed that mesenchymal stem cells turn into cells similar to motor nerve cells on electrospun gelatin, and they express the unique properties of these cells on the surface of gene and protein.

The achievement of the research proves that the engineered cellular structure is a good choice to be transplanted into animal sample to study the treatment of spinal cord injury. Therefore, studies are being carried out at the moment on injured animal samples to use the scaffold containing stem cells.

Source: Nanotechnology Now