Recently, the results of the 14-month-long Sino-American Spinal Cord Injury and Repair Verification Experiment have been published in Experimental Neurology, entitled “Validation study of neurotrophin-3-releasing chitosan facilitation of neural tissue generation in the severely injured adult rat spinal cord”.

Jointly published by the University of Miami, Beihang University and Capital Medical University, this article verifies the reliability and repeatability of Beihang Professor Li Xiaoguang’s research results entitled “NT3-chitosan elicits robust endogenous neurogenesis to enable functional recovery afterspinal cord injury” published in PNAS in 2015.

In 2015, Professor Li Xiaoguang's team discovered that endogenous neural stem cells in the central nervous system of adult rodents can be activated, recruited and migrated to the lesion site to differentiate into mature neurons, which then integrate with the existing neural circuits of the host, leading to the recovery of paraplegia. This study solves the problem of long-distance axon growth in central nervous system and provides a new theoretical basis for central nervous regeneration.

In May of 2018, Professor Li Xiaoguang's team demonstrated for the first time that the bioactive materials independently developed in China can improve the local microenvironment of injury, promote the long-distance regeneration of the cortical spinal tract (CST) of non-human primates Rhesus monkeys, and establish a functional neural network with spinal cord across the injury area, so as to restore the limb function of paraplegia. Related research was published in PNAS, and reported by many media like Science and Technology Daily, People's Daily and Guangming Daily.

The Validation Study is available at:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014488618305363?via%3Dihub

Reported and edited by Wang Qing

Translated by Lyu Xingyun