An overview of tissue engineering approaches for management of spinal cord injuries

Severe spinal cord injury (SCI) leads to devastating neurological deficits and disabilities, which necessitates spending a great deal of health budget for psychological and healthcare problems of these patients and their relatives. This justifies the cost of research into the new modalities for treatment of spinal cord injuries, even in developing countries. Apart from surgical management and nerve grafting, several other approaches have been adopted for management of this condition including pharmacologic and gene therapy, cell therapy, and use of different cell-free or cell-seeded bioscaffolds. In current paper, the recent developments for therapeutic delivery of stem and non-stem cells to the site of injury, and application of cell-free and cell-seeded natural and synthetic scaffolds have been reviewed

Syndromics: A Bioinformatics Approach for Neurotrauma Research

Substantial scientific progress has been made in the past 50 years in delineating many of the biological mechanisms involved in the primary and secondary injuries following trauma to the spinal cord and brain. These advances have highlighted numerous potential therapeutic approaches that may help restore function after injury. Despite these advances, bench-to-bedside translation has remained elusive. Translational testing of novel therapies requires standardized measures of function for comparison across different laboratories, paradigms, and species. Although numerous functional assessments have been developed in animal models, it remains unclear how to best integrate this information to describe the complete translational “syndrome” produced by neurotrauma. The present paper describes a multivariate statistical framework for integrating diverse neurotrauma data and reviews the few papers to date that have taken an information-intensive approach for basic neurotrauma research. We argue that these papers can be described as the seminal works of a new field that we call “syndromics”, which aim to apply informatics tools to disease models to characterize the full set of mechanistic inter-relationships from multi-scale data. In the future, centralized databases of raw neurotrauma data will enable better syndromic approaches and aid future translational research, leading to more efficient testing regimens and more clinically relevant findings

Astrocyte scar formation aids central nervous system axon regeneration

Transected axons fail to regrow in the mature central nervous system. Astrocytic scars are widely regarded as causal in this failure. Here, using three genetically targeted loss-of-function manipulations in adult mice, we show that preventing astrocyte scar formation, attenuating scar-forming astrocytes, or ablating chronic astrocytic scars all failed to result in spontaneous regrowth of transected corticospinal, sensory or serotonergic axons through severe spinal cord injury (SCI) lesions. By contrast, sustained local delivery via hydrogel depots of required axon-specific growth factors not present in SCI lesions, plus growth-activating priming injuries, stimulated robust, laminin-dependent sensory axon regrowth past scar-forming astrocytes and inhibitory molecules in SCI lesions. Preventing astrocytic scar formation significantly reduced this stimulated axon regrowth. RNA sequencing revealed that astrocytes and non-astrocyte cells in SCI lesions express multiple axon-growth-supporting molecules. Our findings show that contrary to the prevailing dogma, astrocyte scar formation aids rather than prevents central nervous system axon regeneration

Variable transfer methods for fluid-structure interaction computations with staggered solvers

This paper intends to study methods that have been tested to transfer variables from one skin mesh to another (the two meshes being nonconform) in order to compute fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems with staggered solvers. The methods are a contact elements method developed by Stam, and different radial basis functions methods. The structure code is OOFELIE® developed at Open-Engineering (Belgium) and the fluid code is FINETM/Hexa developed at Numeca International (Belgium). The paper presents the performances of the methods on a simple variable transfer, and testcases that have been performed with the solver developed by the two companies

Effect of geometrical nonlinearity on MEMS thermoelastic damping

Although the thermoelastic damping is a direct consequence of thermodynamic relations, its influence in macroscopic systems can be considered as negligible. This is not the case in microscopic devices, where this effect can be, for instance, one of the main causes that limit the quality factor of MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) resonators. Besides showing why it is important to introduce the thermoelastic damping in the design of MEMS, we present simulation results that demonstrate the differences that appear when a realistic nonlinear analysis is considered instead of using a linear approximation. Thus, we show how the nonlinearities due to large displacements impact the oscillation frequency as well as the decay time of displacements and energy for a MEMS cantilever. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

3-D self-assembled SOI MEMS : an example of multiphysics simulation

MEMS devices are typical systems where multiphysics simulations are unavoidable. In this work, we present possible applications of 3-D self-assembled SOI (Silicon-on-Insulator) MEMS such as, for instance, thermal actuators and flow sensors. The numerical simulations of these microsystems are presented. Structural and thermal parts have to be strongly coupled for correctly describing the fabrication process and for simulating the behavior of these 3-D SOI MEMS