Epidermal neural crest stem cell-derived glia enhance neurotrophic elements in an ex vivo model of spinal cord injury.

Growing evidence that cell-based therapies can improve recovery outcome in spinal cord injury (SCI) models substantiates their application for treatment of human with SCI. To address the effectiveness of these stem cells, potential candidates should be evaluated in proper SCI platform that allows direct real-time monitoring. In this study, the role of epidermal neural crest stem cells (EPI-NCSCs) was elucidated in an ex vivo model of SCI, and valproic acid (VPA) was administered to ameliorate the inhospitable context of injury for grafted EPI-NCSCs. Here the contusion was induced in organotypic spinal cord slice culture at day seven in vitro using a weight drop device and one hour post injury the GFP- expressing EPI-NCSCs were grafted followed by VPA administration. The evaluation of treated slices seven days after injury revealed that grafted stem cells survived on the injured slices and expressed GFAP, whereas they did not express any detectable levels of the neural progenitor marker doublecortin (DCX), which was expressed prior to transplantation. Immunoblotting data demonstrated that the expression of GFAP, BDNF, neurotrophin-3 (NT3), and Bcl2 increased significantly in stem cell treated slices. This study illustrated that the fate of transplanted stem cells has been directed to the glial lineage in the ex vivo context of injury and EPI-NCSCs may ameliorate the SCI condition through releasing neurotrophic factors directly and/or via inducing resident spinal cord cells.