Abstract
Cell-based therapies have become a major focus in preclinical research that leads to clinical application of a therapeutic product. Since 1990, scientists at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis have generated extensive data demonstrating that Schwann cell (SC) transplantation supports spinal cord repair in animals with spinal cord injury. After preclinical efforts in SC transplantation strategies, efficient methods for procuring large, essentially pure populations of SCs from the adult peripheral nerve were developed for rodent and pig studies. This chapter describes a series of simple procedures to obtain and cryopreserve large cultures of highly purified adult nerve-derived SCs without the need for additional purification steps. This protocol permits the derivation of ≥90% pure rodent and porcine SCs within 2–4 weeks of culture.
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Acknowledgment
We thank Risset Silvera, Maxwell Donaldson, and Yelena Pressman for their technical assistance. We acknowledge the outstanding contributions of Linda White in the development of these preclinical protocols. We also are immensely grateful to Patrick Wood and Paula Monje for their critical review and valuable comments that greatly improved the manuscript. Key participants supporting this project were Drs. W. Dalton Dietrich, Allan Levi, James Guest, Damien Pearse, and Kim Anderson. This work was funded from the NIH-NINDS, the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, the Buoniconti Fund, and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation International Research Consortium.
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Brooks, A.E., Athauda, G., Bunge, M.B., Khan, A. (2018). Culture and Expansion of Rodent and Porcine Schwann Cells for Preclinical Animal Studies. In: Monje, P., Kim, H. (eds) Schwann Cells. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1739. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7649-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7649-2_7
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