In vitro and in vivo analysis and characterization of engineered spinal neural implants
(Conference Presentation)

Erez Shor; Shy Shoham; Shulamit Levenberg

doi:10.1117/12.2213904

26 April 2016 In vitro and in vivo analysis and characterization of engineered spinal neural implants (Conference Presentation)

Erez Shor, Shy Shoham, Shulamit Levenberg

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9690, Clinical and Translational Neurophotonics; Neural Imaging and Sensing; and Optogenetics and Optical Manipulation; 96901K (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2213904
Event: SPIE BiOS, 2016, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

Spinal cord injury is a devastating medical condition. Recent developments in pre-clinical and clinical research have started to yield neural implants inducing functional recovery after spinal cord transection injury. However, the functional performance of the transplants was assessed using histology and behavioral experiments which are unable to study cell dynamics and the therapeutic response. Here, we use neurophotonic tools and optogenetic probes to investigate cellular level morphology and activity characteristics of neural implants over time at the cellular level. These methods were used in-vitro and in-vivo, in a mouse spinal cord injury implant model. Following previous attempts to induce recovery after spinal cord injury, we engineered a pre-vascularized implant to obtain better functional performance. To image network activity of a construct implanted in a mouse spinal cord, we transfected the implant to express GCaMP6 calcium activity indicators and implanted these constructs under a spinal cord chamber enabling 2-photon chronic in vivo neural activity imaging. Activity and morphology analysis image processing software was developed to automatically quantify the behavior of the neural and vascular networks. Our experimental results and analyses demonstrate that vascularized and non-vascularized constructs exhibit very different morphologic and activity patterns at the cellular level. This work enables further optimization of neural implants and also provides valuable tools for continuous cellular level monitoring and evaluation of transplants designed for various neurodegenerative disease models.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Erez Shor, Shy Shoham, and Shulamit Levenberg "In vitro and in vivo analysis and characterization of engineered spinal neural implants (Conference Presentation)", Proc. SPIE 9690, Clinical and Translational Neurophotonics; Neural Imaging and Sensing; and Optogenetics and Optical Manipulation, 96901K (26 April 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2213904

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KEYWORDS

Spinal cord

In vivo imaging

Injuries

In vitro testing

Neurophotonics

Optogenetics

Calcium

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