Cellular transplants: steps toward restoration of function in spinal injured animals.

Severe spinal cord injury results in severe, persisting deficits with little hope for substantial recovery. Recent developments in transplantation protocols, gene therapy, and methods of evaluation now offer hope of developing treatments that will lead to better prognoses. This review discusses the consequences of spinal injury, animal models used to study injury and recovery, types of cellular transplants, selection of behavioral and physiological tests of recovery, and ways to test the efficacy of the interventions and to improve transplant-mediated recovery.