Recently, a research article authorized by Prof. Xiangyu Jin and Dr. Chen Huang from College of Textiles has been published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces recently (ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2015, 7, 7189−7196). The paper, entitled “Nerve Guidance Conduits from Aligned Nanofibers: Improvement of Nerve Regeneration through Longitudinal Nanogrooves on a Fiber Surface”, reports joint research findings on peripheral nerve regeneration from Donghua University, Deakin University (Australia) and the Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital of Shanghai Jiaotong University.
As a common disease, peripheral nerve injury causes severe pain and burden to patients. Regeneration of the lesion normally requires clinical implantation of nerve guidance conduits. Numerous studies have proved that, for fibrous nerve guidance conduit, neural cells would be induced to grow along the same direction of fiber alignment on the inner wall of the conduit, which plays an important role in facilitating nerve recovery.
The paper used electrospinning method to prepare fibrous conduits consisting of well-aligned nanofibers with longitudinal nanogrooves on fiber surface. The conduits were then subjected to an in vivo nerve regeneration study on rats using a sciatic nerve injury model. For comparison, fibrous conduits having a similar fiber alignment without surface groove were also conducted in the same test. Immunohistological analyses indicated that grooved fibers could effectively improve sciatic nerve regeneration, which is mainly attributed to the highly ordered nano/micro structure formed by the surface grooves and fiber alignment. The fibrous conduits, along with the grooved nanofibers reported in this paper may offer a new nerve guidance conduit for peripheral nerve repair and regeneration.
The research was published with Dr. Chen Huang as the first author and was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (51403033) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2232014D3-15).
