1.0 Neural Tissue Engineering
Nerve injury and loss are common clinical problems, that can cause significant affects to a patient’s overall quality of life: Whether within the Peripheral or Central Nervous Systems. Neural Engineering is a sub-discipline within Biomedical Engineering that utilizes engineering techniques to understand, repair, replace and even enhance the properties of the neural system. In the field of Neural Tissue Engineering, the practice has been greatly limited to the spinal cord and peripheral nervous system. As such, the main focus of this paper is in the various formats that have been implemented in the past, and current methods employed today in order to facilitate nerve regeneration within the peripheral nerves. …show more content…
And they can be thought of as any biomaterial based scaffold commonly used throughout the field of Tissue Engineering. In general, success in Tissue Engineering has been limited by the lack of knowledge of the mechanisms of biocompatibility within a regenerative environment, whether being the biochemical cue or biophysical stimuli. With TENGs being no exception to this, traditional biomaterials varied greatly with more recent adaptations taking into consideration the many new discoveries pertinent to neural …show more content…
Originally, scaffolds were formed into simple cylindrical tubes, and known as nerve guidance channels or conduits (NGC) which are the early forms of TENGs. NGCs are used in non-critical, small-diameter sensory nerve gaps of 3 cm or less. NGCs localize Schwann cell migration allowing the accumulation of trophic factors. Their small diameter allows for the diffusion of nutrients into nonvascularized areas, and the short length allows for complete permeation of Schwann Cells. In cases where nerve gap is less than 1 cm, results are better than those seen in autografts. But, neurons aren 't singularly linear structures, their axon can branch out into multiple axons (known as contralaterals). Thus leading to more complex configurations (no longer a singular tube), having multiple component compositions within its inner lining (or surface area), are seen and used in present day. Yet there are still many problems, even with all of the advances so far; one being that NGCs regenerated nerves do not maintain their axonal morphology. This leads us into the future and current research in neural tissue
Nerve injury and loss are common clinical problems, that can cause significant affects to a patient’s overall quality of life: Whether within the Peripheral or Central Nervous Systems. Neural Engineering is a sub-discipline within Biomedical Engineering that utilizes engineering techniques to understand, repair, replace and even enhance the properties of the neural system. In the field of Neural Tissue Engineering, the practice has been greatly limited to the spinal cord and peripheral nervous system. As such, the main focus of this paper is in the various formats that have been implemented in the past, and current methods employed today in order to facilitate nerve regeneration within the peripheral nerves. …show more content…
And they can be thought of as any biomaterial based scaffold commonly used throughout the field of Tissue Engineering. In general, success in Tissue Engineering has been limited by the lack of knowledge of the mechanisms of biocompatibility within a regenerative environment, whether being the biochemical cue or biophysical stimuli. With TENGs being no exception to this, traditional biomaterials varied greatly with more recent adaptations taking into consideration the many new discoveries pertinent to neural …show more content…
Originally, scaffolds were formed into simple cylindrical tubes, and known as nerve guidance channels or conduits (NGC) which are the early forms of TENGs. NGCs are used in non-critical, small-diameter sensory nerve gaps of 3 cm or less. NGCs localize Schwann cell migration allowing the accumulation of trophic factors. Their small diameter allows for the diffusion of nutrients into nonvascularized areas, and the short length allows for complete permeation of Schwann Cells. In cases where nerve gap is less than 1 cm, results are better than those seen in autografts. But, neurons aren 't singularly linear structures, their axon can branch out into multiple axons (known as contralaterals). Thus leading to more complex configurations (no longer a singular tube), having multiple component compositions within its inner lining (or surface area), are seen and used in present day. Yet there are still many problems, even with all of the advances so far; one being that NGCs regenerated nerves do not maintain their axonal morphology. This leads us into the future and current research in neural tissue