Regenerative therapy for spinal cord avulsion injury and spine-related diseases.

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We carried out a basic study for a regenerative therapy for the spinal cord avulsion injury, for which there has been no effective treatment by now. Neural stem cells, which were harvested from hippocampus tissue of rat fetuses, were induced via cerebrospinal fluid to the injured sites of the spinal cord and avulsed spinal roots of adult rats, and how these stem cells differentiate in that site was investigated immunohistochemistrically. As a result, infused neural stem cells were attached to, and integrated into, the lesions of the avulsion site. Most of these integrated cells displayed the immunoreactivity for S-100 protein and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP). We concluded that the stem cells possibly differentiated to astrocytes in the lesions, however, differentiation to neurons was not observed in any avulsion-injury models of this study.