Advances in Bionic Therapies for Targeting Neural Circuit Reconstruction and Integration for Spinal Cord Injury.

Abstract

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is one of the most common critical illnesses, which can cause neurological deficits and disabilities of motor, sensory and autonomic nervous system in mild cases, and lead to paralysis or even death following severe trauma. Although there are currently no effective and satisfactory clinical treatments, the efforts for repair SCI never stop. Besides the traditional strategies such as drugs, surgical interventions and rehabilitative care, the bionic therapies have attracted significant attention due to its considerable promise. The bionic therapies for SCI mainly included engineered biomaterials-based approaches aiming for reconstruction of internal neural circuit and brain machine interfaces (BMI)-based technologies to integrate extrinsic control and intrinsic circuit. This review provides an extensive overview of SCI research and bionic therapies, with focus on reconstruction and integration of neural circuit, which might provide promising insights on clinical treatment.