QBI Neuroscience Seminar: 'Bioengineering neural repair in the central nervous system'

Event Details

Date:

Thursday, 30 May 2019 - Thursday, 30 May 2019

Time:

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Room:

QBI Level 7 Auditorium

UQ Location:

Queensland Brain Institute (St Lucia)

URL:

http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/neuroscience-seminars

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Dr Tim O'Shea
Departments of Neurobiology and Bioengineering
University of California, Los Angeles

Title: 'Bioengineering neural repair in the central nervous system'

Abstract: 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, and persistence, of a lesion 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 lesions. The second part of the talk evaluates the application of neural progenitor cell grafts to CNS injury and outlines how directed differentiation of these grafts into specific neural cell phenotypes in vivo may be used to provide long-term support to stimulated axon regeneration paradigms. The last part of the talk will describe advances made in the characterization of 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.