Achievement

With the Yarmush and Banerjee labs, fellow Andrea Gray focused on how MSCs may provide tissue protection and promote healing after spinal cord injury. They found MSCs that are administered as single cell suspensions have inefficient homing and engraftment in the target tissue and that MSCs therapeutic mechanisms are not constitutive but must be induced by external activating molecules. To address both of these concerns, they have encapsulated MSC in alginate containing magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) coated with molecules that may activate MSC intracapsularly. They have found that co-encapsulation of MSC with 4 mg/ml MNP coated with chitosan or glucuronic acid significatly increase the constitutive secretion of IL-6 from the MSC. This iss an initial proof-of-principle that the simply introducing coated MNP into the biopolymer could result in activation of the encapsulated MSC.