Clinical and Experimental Advances in Regeneration of Spinal Cord Injury

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is one of the major disabilities dealtwith in clinical rehabilitation settings and is multifactorial in that the patientssuffer from motor and sensory impairments as well as many other complications throughouttheir lifetimes. Many clinical trials have been documented during the last two decadesto restore damaged spinal cords. However, only a few pharmacological therapies used inclinical settings which still have only limited effects on the regeneration, recoveryspeed, or retraining of the spinal cord. In this paper, we will introduce recentclinical trials, which performed pharmacological treatments and cell transplantationsfor patients with SCI, and evaluate recent in vivo studies for the regeneration ofinjured spinal cord, including stem-cell transplantation, application of neurotrophicfactors and suppressor of inhibiting factors, development of biomaterial scaffolds anddelivery systems, rehabilitation, and the combinations of these therapies to evaluatewhat can be appropriately applied in the future to the patients with SCI