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Review
. 2011 Jul 20;2(7):336-45.
doi: 10.1021/cn200030w. Epub 2011 May 4.

Hydrogels in spinal cord injury repair strategies

Giuseppe Perale  1 , Filippo Rossi, Erik Sundstrom, Sara Bacchiega, Maurizio Masi, Gianluigi Forloni, Pietro Veglianese
Affiliations
Review

Hydrogels in spinal cord injury repair strategies

Giuseppe Perale et al. ACS Chem Neurosci. .

Abstract

Nowadays there are at present no efficient therapies for spinal cord injury (SCI), and new approaches have to be proposed. Recently, a new regenerative medicine strategy has been suggested using smart biomaterials able to carry and deliver cells and/or drugs in the damaged spinal cord. Among the wide field of emerging materials, research has been focused on hydrogels, three-dimensional polymeric networks able to swell and absorb a large amount of water. The present paper intends to give an overview of a wide range of natural, synthetic, and composite hydrogels with particular efforts for the ones studied in the last five years. Here, different hydrogel applications are underlined, together with their different nature, in order to have a clearer view of what is happening in one of the most sparkling fields of regenerative medicine.

Keywords: Hydrogels; polymers; regenerative medicine; scaffold; spinal cord injury; tissue engineering.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Tissue engineering approaches: the smart combination of cells and materials to replace damaged or missing parts of living tissues. Reproduced with permission from ref (16). Copyright Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Geographical areas of intellectual property rights protection on hydrogels for SCi repair: darker colors illustrate a higher number of applications.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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