Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine to Repair Spinal Cord Injuries
Level - GradAmong the most exciting frontiers in medicine today is the repair of traumatic injuries to the spinal cord. Improvements in treatment are helping many more people survive spinal cord injury. Yet most spinal cord injuries still cause life long disabilities, and continued research is critically needed. Recent advances in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine offer the hope that injured spinal cords could be repaired or regenerated. For successful repair or regeneration to occur, however, damaged nerve cells must survive or be replaced, and axons must re-grow and find appropriate targets. Axons and their targets must then interact to construct synapses, the specialized structures that act as the functional connections between nerve cells. Because of your expertise in both engineering and medicine, you have been assigned to develop an innovative but realistic research plan to address the problems associated with spinal cord injury and repair, such as nerve cell death and difficulties in achieving neuron and axon interconnectivity. Please feel free to propose hypothesis-driven or design-driven research. You may also choose to use a primarily tissue engineering approach, a regenerative medicine approach, or a combination of both.