Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Diego, CA

2 ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN JoVE

Neuroscience

Promotion of Survival and Differentiation of Neural Stem Cells with Fibrin and Growth Factor Cocktails after Severe Spinal Cord Injury

Paul Lu^1,2, Lori Graham², Yaozhi Wang², Di Wu², Mark Tuszynski^1,2

¹Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Diego, ²Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego

Fibrin matrices containing growth factors were used to retain grafted neural stem cells into sites of complete spinal cord transection. Grafted cells completely filled the lesion cavity and differentiated into multiple neural cell types, including neurons that extended axons into host spinal cord over long distances.

Medicine

A Radio-telemetric System to Monitor Cardiovascular Function in Rats with Spinal Cord Transection and Embryonic Neural Stem Cell Grafts

Shaoping Hou¹, Armin Blesch², Paul Lu^3,4

¹Spinal Cord Research Center, Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy, Drexel University College of Medicine, ²Spinal Cord Injury Center, Heidelberg University Hospital, ³Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Diego, CA, ⁴Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego

We present a protocol for using a radio-telemetric system to record cardiovascular parameters in T4 spinal cord transected rats eight weeks after embryonic brainstem neural stem cell grafting into the lesion site. Telemetry is an advanced technique to accurately evaluate cardiovascular function in conscious freely moving spinal cord injured rats.