Ischemic stroke was a leading cause of death and long‐term disability. It was an effective way to improve cerebral ischemia injury by promoting angiogenesis and neuroprotection. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) was a potent pro‐angiogenic factor, and had neuroprotective effect. A short peptide (PR1P) derived from the extracellular VEGF‐binding glycoprotein‐Prominin‐1 was reported to specifically bind to VEGF. In order to realize sustained release of VEGF, a bio‐functional peptide‐CBD‐PR1P was constructed, which target VEGF to collagen hydrogels to limit the diffusion of VEGF. When the collagen hydrogels loading with CBD‐PR1P and VEGF were injected into the cerebral ischemic cortex, increased angiogenesis, decreased apoptosis and enhanced neurons survival were observed in the ischemic area, that promoted the motor functional recovery of cerebral ischemic injury. Thus, this targeting delivery system of VEGF provided a promising therapeutic strategy for cerebral ischemia.
Spinal cord injury (SCI) will lead to irreversible damage of sensory and motor function of central nervous system, which seriously affects patient's quality of life. A variety of nerve engineering materials carrying various stem cells and cell growth factors had used to promote the repair of SCI, but they could not mimic the actual matric niche at spinal cord to promote cell proliferation and differentiation. Thus, developing novel biomaterial providing better niche of spinal cord is a new strategy to treat the severe SCI. In this study, we constructed porcine spinal cord decellularized matrix scaffold (SC-DM) with biocompatibility to load engineered basic fibroblast growth factoroverexpressing human umbilical cord mesenchymal stromal cells (bFGF-HUCMSCs) for treating SCI. The continuously released bioactive bFGF factors from grafted bFGF-HUCMSCs and three-dimensional niche by SC-DM promoted the differentiation of endogenous stem cells into neurons with nerve conduction function, leading a markedly motor function recovery of SCI. These results indicated that the functional bFGF-HUCMSCs/SC-DM scaffold provided more suitable matric niche for nerve cells, that would be a promising strategy for the clinical application of SCI.axon regeneration, basic fibroblast growth factor, human umbilical cord mesenchymal stromal cells, spinal cord decellularized matrix, spinal cord injury Grażyna Kami nska-WinciorWenli He and Chunying Shi contributed equally to this work.
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