Traumatic injury to the spinal cord interrupts ascending and descending
pathways leading to severe functional deficits of sensory motor and autonomic
function which depend on the level and severity of the injury. There are
currently no effective therapies for treating such injuries and the adult central
nervous system has very limited capacity for repair so that recovery is very
limited and functional deficits are usually permanent. Cell transplantation is a
potential therapy for spinal cord injury and a range of cell types are being
investigated as candidates. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) obtained from bone
marrow are one cell type quite extensively studied. When transplanted into
animal models of spinal cord injury these cells are reported to affect various
aspects of repair and in some cases to improve functional outcome according to
behavioural measures. However, the use of these cells has several limitations
including the need for an invasive harvesting procedure, variability in cell
quality and slow expansion in culture. This project therefore had two main aims:
Firstly to investigate whether MSC-like cells closely equivalent to bone marrow
derived MSCs could be reliably and consistently differentiated from human
embryonic stem cells (hESCs) in order to provide an “off the shelf” cellular
therapy product for spinal cord injury and secondly, to transplant such cells into
animal models of spinal cord injury in order to, determine whether hESC-derived
MSCs replicate or improve on the repair mechanisms reported for bone marrow
MSCs
