“Patching” the Primate Spinal Cord With Human Neural Stem Cells
An interdisciplinary team made of neuroscientists, neurologists, and neurosurgeons, led by Dr. Mark Tuzynski at the University of California - San Diego (UCSD, San Diego, CA), reported this past February in Nature Medicine the successful grafting of human spinal cord-derived neural progenitor cells (NPCs) into the spinal cord of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) with high level (i.e., cervical) injuries. The grafts not only survived for at least 9 months post-injury, and but also developed large numbers of axons that traveled over long distances within the injured spinal cord and were also penetrated by host axons. Fig. 1 from original article [...]