BRIC

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is still an invalidating pathology, mostly as a consequence of an acute traumatic event, burdening patients’ lives and health-care systems. Chronic SCI is characterized by a permanent loss of large amounts of nervous tissue and formation of a gliotic scar constituting a physico-chemical barrier to nervous regeneration. To date, no effective therapeutic approach is available yet for chronic SCI. Human neural stem cells (hNSCs) feature tremendous potential for neuroregenerative therapies in humans but they are ineffective whenever a consistent loss of nervous tissue has occurred, like in chronic SCI. Therapies based on transplanted cells and/or regenerating nervous fibres require the use of proper substrates to favour cell engraftment and host tissue regeneration, which is needed to regenerate the neural-circuitry pre-existing the injury. Self-assembling peptides (SAPs) are synthetic biomaterials (made of natural amino acids) at the forefront of nervous tissue engineering because they are bioabsorbable, highly biocompatible, and biomimetic, i.e. amenable of functionalization with active moieties interacting with cells and proteins. In addition, SAPs provide nanostructured microenvironments morphologically resembling the natural extracellular matrices (ECM). Indeed, SAPs alone or in combination with cell transplants have shown great promise for neuronal regeneration.