We are interested in developing a promising regenerative approach to address spinal cord injuries. In this paper, we validate spinal cord organotypic model for testing cellular replacement therapies in spinal cord research. So far, spinal cord organotypic models are maintained in culture for two or three weeks in vitro.
And subculture media are suboptimal for neural stem cell engraftment, differentiation, and maturation. Cell replacement therapies still require the improvement to announce the ability of the grafted cells to reconstitute the lost circuits. Through this protocol, we provide a novel, long-term ex vivo platform to tackle cell transplant related issue like survival, integration, and maturation rate of the engrafted neural stem cells.
This platform will be helpful for researchers to find the best strategy for cell transplantation, reducing the number of animals required for in vivo validation. Our protocol is simple, fast, and cost-effective to perform proof of concept and optimization studies.
