Neural Tissue Engineering

Harini Sundararaghavan, an assistant professor in Wayne State University's Department of Biomedical Engineering, is working on neural tissue engineering in her lab to replace scar tissue with a more favorable material that neurons can grow on and reconnect healthy tissue. This research has implications for people with peripheral and spinal cord injuries.

Transcript

00:00:10 I'm Pini Sagan I'm an assistant professor in biomedical engineering at Wayne State we focus on neural tissue engineering so developing materials that promote nerve regeneration so the focus of tissue engineering is usually to develop materials to replace diseased tissue so we're looking at both peripheral and

00:00:31 central nervous system so focused on spinal cord regeneration for people with a spinal cord injury and um peripheral nerve regeneration if you have some sort of peripheral nerve injury particularly in the spinal cord for a long time it was thought that the neurons cannot regrow they're once they're dead they're just dead um but more recently it's been found that the main problem is that the

00:00:53 environment that the neurons are in is not conducive to their growth so the neurons are seeing cues that make them not want to grow through those injury sites and that's where the the neural tissue engineering comes in so we're trying to replace that injured Scar Tissue with a material a more favorable material material that the neurons want to grow on and can grow on so what we're

00:01:17 trying to make is a fibrous conduit a nerve growth conduit that um that you can physically put into the injury site that will promote and direct the neurons to cross that injury Gap um we add fibers to our materials using a process called Electro spinning where we can um kind of align these fibers so neurons tend to grow along different topographical cues so they can follow

00:01:44 this fiber alignment and that's one thing we're really excited about um CU we want to be able to direct the neurons kind of across these injury sites um you know if you look at it through a through high magnification you'll see these nanofibers and that's the material that the cells can feel and grow on so we want to mimic neural tissue so we want it to have the same similar mechanics to

00:02:07 neural tissue and the same type of adhesion sites so that neurons like to grow on them each Professor is um responsible for funding their own lab as far as materials um cell culture supplies cells um the different lab equipment um The Graduate students so as part of my startup I'm I have funding for 2 to 3 years depending on how it goes

00:02:34 and then I really have to have my own funding after that so half my time is spent looking at writing grants and talking to people that fund grants and trying to get money for the lab I mean the ultimate goal is to help the people that are severely injured because there really is no current treatment for people that have a very a severe injury and are actually quadriplegic or

00:02:58 paraplegic so you over overall goal is to help people with more severe injuries