Tissue-Engineered Biomaterials as a Solution to Peripheral Nervous System Injury

Peripheral nerve injuries impact millions of Americans each year with many more living with the effects of traumatic nerve injuries. In severe peripheral nerve injuries, nerve pathways, connections, and the extracellular matrix (ECM) tissue surrounding nerve that lead to the sensory or motor targets are damaged. If the injury gap is larger than 2 centimeters, functional recovery is extremely limited and no adequate therapies are currently available. This deeply impacts the quality of life due to the loss of connection between the central nervous system and the body’s extremities. Neurons do not have the ability or needed signals from the damaged ECM surrounding the injury site to allow guided growth of axons across the injury space. Therefore, this project will address the urgent need to engineer novel biomaterials that give the proper electrical, physical, and chemical signaling to cells and neurons for guided nerve regeneration and provide functional recoveries in traumatic nerve injuries. This will be accomplished by engineering biomaterials (Figure 1A,B) to possess the proper physical, electrical, and chemical signals in order to direct cell alignment and growth. We will develop these biomaterials to deliver defined, tunable signals to the cells in order to elicit the desired cellular outcomes (Figure 1C,D). It is hypothesized that the biomaterial, in combination with relevant cells and ECM, will functionally bridge the injury gap to restore function to injured tissues.