Bioengineering neural repair in the central nervous system

Following traumatic injury to the adult central nervous system (CNS), neural connectivity is lost and fails to spontaneously regrow. This regeneration failure may be due to an intrinsic inability for damaged neurons to regrow in the adult as well as the formation of a stromal and inflammatory cell laden non-neural lesion core that is devoid of essential axon growth cues. The first part of this talk dissects the cell biology of traumatic CNS injury lesions and demonstrates that stimulating axons to regrow after injury requires the sequential re-activation of neuronal growth capacity and the reintroduction of essential molecular factors not present in CNS lesion compartments. The second part of the talk will outline how the grafting of neural progenitor cells into CNS lesions may be used to provide long-term support to stimulated axon regeneration paradigms. The last part of the talk will describe the development of an immunohistochemical framework to evaluate the multicellular CNS foreign body response to biomaterials and how various properties of biomaterials can be manipulated to improve the functionality of these tools in bioengineered neural repair strategies.

Bio
Dr. Timothy O’Shea is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Neurobiology at UCLA. He completed his PhD study in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics within the collaborative Health Sciences and Technology program of the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tim conducted PhD thesis research with Institute Professor Robert Langer developing injectable biomaterials to improve the delivery of reparative therapies for the treatment of various central nervous system (CNS) diseases. At UCLA he works with Professors Michael Sofroniew (Neurobiology) and Timothy Deming (Bioengineering) developing and testing novel bioengineering tools to study biological mechanisms involved in CNS injury and repair. He has held research fellowships from the Sir John Monash Foundation, the Society of Chemical Industry, the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, Paralyzed Veterans of America and American Australian Association. His research has been published in Nature, JCI, Cell Reports, JACS, Advanced Materials, Biomaterials and other leading journals.

Video transmission using zoom : https://epfl.zoom.us/j/9946495775