Regenerative medicine for spinal cord injury: Current status and open issues

抄録

Spinal cord injuries result in devastating loss of function, because spinal cord of human beings never regenerates after injury. People believed in this dogma for a long time. There is an emerging hope for regeneration-based therapy of the damaged spinal cord due to the progress of neuroscience and regenerative medicine including stem cell biology. In this review, we have summarized recent studies aimed at the development of regeneration-based therapeutic approaches for spinal cord injuries, including therapy with transplantation of neural crest stem cells and induction of axonal regeneration, and the establishment of new method for evaluating injured and regenerated axonal fibers by MRI.