Neural stem cell (NSC) grafts have demonstrated significant effects in animal models of spinal cord injury (SCI), yet their clinical translation remains challenging. Significant evidence suggests that the supporting matrix of NSC grafts has a crucial role in regulating NSC effects. Here we demonstrate that grafts based on porous collagen-based scaffolds (PCSs), similar to biomaterials utilized clinically in induced regeneration, can deliver and protect embryonic NSCs at SCI sites, leading to significant improvement in locomotion recovery in an experimental mouse SCI model, so that 12 weeks post-injury locomotion performance of implanted animals does not statistically differ from that of uninjured control animals. NSC-seeded PCS grafts can modulate key processes required to induce regeneration in SCI lesions including enhancing NSC neuronal differentiation and functional integration in vivo, enabling robust axonal elongation, and reducing astrogliosis. Our findings suggest that the efficacy and translational potential of emerging NSC-based SCI therapies could be enhanced by delivering NSC via scaffolds derived from well-characterized clinically proven PCS.
Microneurotrophins, small-molecule mimetics of endogenous neurotrophins, have demonstrated significant therapeutic effects on various animal models of neurological diseases. Nevertheless, their effects on central nervous system injuries remain unknown. Herein, we evaluate the effects of microneurotrophin BNN27, an NGF analog, in the mouse dorsal column crush spinal cord injury (SCI) model. BNN27 was delivered systemically either by itself or combined with neural stem cell (NSC)-seeded collagen-based scaffold grafts, demonstrated recently to improve locomotion performance in the same SCI model. Data validate the ability of NSC-seeded grafts to enhance locomotion recovery, neuronal cell integration with surrounding tissues, axonal elongation and angiogenesis. Our findings also show that systemic administration of BNN27 significantly reduced astrogliosis and increased neuron density in mice SCI lesion sites at 12 weeks post injury. Furthermore, when BNN27 administration was combined with NSC-seeded PCS grafts, BNN27 increased the density of survived implanted NSC-derived cells, possibly addressing a major challenge of NSC-based SCI treatments. In conclusion, this study provides evidence that small-molecule mimetics of endogenous neurotrophins can contribute to effective combinatorial treatments for SCI, by simultaneously regulating key events of SCI and supporting grafted cell therapies in the lesion site.
The editorial note unfolds the main aims and the particular working conditions of the project that has led to the specific publication. Syros: a bet on the potentiality of cooperation (2013) was organized as a co-writing encounter among performance artists and theorists from all over Europe. During an eight-days long writing residency the participants shared their individual topics of interest regarding contemporary performance as well as their distinct writing practices. Following that process, they also suggested an alternative mode for the creators of this publication, based not on a common topic (as is often the case) but on the “topos”, the place of encounter of its writers, which is seen as a “bet on the potentiality of cooperation” (Laermans).
This article discusses institutionalized research in the context of the Performing Arts and the Humanities today. It argues that the term “research” is used frequently for profiling institutions but is rarely reflected upon for providing an understanding of what it is, which contributes to homogenizing and canonizing what (artistic) research means and how it can function in the neoliberal context. As a result, the expression of force and desire of research to search and invent are compromised. Against this background, the article claims that the gap between research as an idea(l), a process and force, and research as an institutional undertaking or as product, should be persevered, in order for research to invent, interrogate and play a role within the political and public sphere it is part of.
With the term “collateral art”, Janez Janša discusses works created as “side effects”, as a collateral consequence of an action. He uses the term to refer to the side effects that the changing of their names had in the case of the three Slovenian artists Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša. This series of “side effects” is revealing the complicit character of the functioning of art in contemporary society.
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