Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Hyaluronic Acid Hydrogel: A
Favourable Niche for Neural
Stem Cells
Ying Wang and Qunyuan Xu
1.1 Introduction
Injury in the central nervous system (CNS) is very serious and may
result in permanent disability of the patients, since it causes neural
cell death and tissue defects. There have been no effective therapies
so far, unfortunately. Many studies have already shown that neural
stem cells (NSC) can be used for treatment of certain neurological
diseases because they have the intrinsic ability of self-renewal.
However, the effect of NSC grafting for neural restoration has been
proven to be rather limited because of low viability and undesired
differentiation
in vivo
[1-4]. One of the reasons for this limitation is
due to an unfavorable niche for survival and growth of grafted NSC in
an injured CNS tissue. This includes glial scar formation, expression
of factors which inhibit regeneration, and deficiency of neurotrophic
or growth factors in the injury area [5, 6]. It is critical therefore, that
creation of a suitable microenvironment or niche, composed of cells,
blood vessels, growth factors and the extracellular matrix (ECM),
would play an important role in regulating neurogenesis, survival
and regeneration of NSC [7-9]. Thus, certain biomaterials used for
neural tissue engineering may offer a promising approach for creating
such a microenvironment, since they provide
biological scaffolds
which can sustain the stem cells for transplantation and neural
regrowth
in vivo
[10, 11].
Among those materials, the hyaluronic
acid (HA)-based biodegradable hydrogel has been proven to mimic
brain ECM effectively and to provide a good scaffold that is easily
Search WWH ::
Custom Search