Spinal cord injury and stroke are two devastating neurological events that lack effective clinical treatments. Recent neuroregenerative approaches involving the delivery of cells or drugs to the injured tissue have shown promise, but face critical challenges to clinical translation. Herein, hyaluronan-methylcellulose (HAMC) hydrogels were investigated as a versatile means of overcoming the challenges facing central nervous system cell and drug delivery. HAMC was shown to support the viability of encapsulated human umbilical tissue-derived cells, demonstrating utility as a scaffold for therapeutic cell delivery to the injured spinal cord. In a drug delivery context, release of the neuroregenerative drug cyclosporin A from the hydrogel was tunable over 2-28 days and the drug diffused to the stem cell niche in the brain and persisted for up to 24 days at a stable concentration when the HAMC-based system was implanted epi-cortically. HAMC is thus a promising tool for emerging neuroregenerative therapies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/33350 |
| Date | 21 November 2012 |
| Creators | Caicco, Matthew |
| Contributors | Shoichet, Molly |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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