Bioinspired nanomaterials for the treatment of diseases and disorders of the central nervous system
Creators: name: Rathnam, Christopher
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2021

description: Diseases and disorders of the central nervous system are often times some of the most difficult diseases to treat. Unlike most other areas of the body, the delicate cellular structure and the complex wound healing process found in the central nervous system makes it very difficult to regenerate tissue after damage. Two such disorders are spinal cord injury and hearing loss. In the case of spinal cord injury, damage to the spinal column causes death of the neurons found in the spinal cord. Further degeneration occurs from the extremely inhibitory and inflammatory environment that is created post injury. Therefore, the body’s natural healing mechanisms do not work. In hearing loss, specifically sensorineural hearing loss, the death of hair cells and neurons found in the inner ear from either physical damages, over exposure to loud noises, or ototoxic drugs leads to a loss of sensation of sound. Once these sensory structures are damaged the body cannot replace them on their own and medical devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants are needed. Neither of these, however, typically help when there is profound loss of the sensory neurons in the inner ear. Therefore, developing methods to treat and cure these ailments is of the utmost priority. Currently two areas of therapy have arisen as promising options for the treatment of such disorders. Both cell therapy and gene therapy provide therapeutic avenues that are not attainable through other therapeutic methods. This is because both cell therapy and gene therapy allow for either the delivery of new cells into the damaged area to mitigate pathologies and replace damaged tissues, or allow for activation of endogenous cells to perform the same functions. While extremely promising these techniques are limited by the technologies needed to deploy them. For cell therapy, often times single cell injection is the gold standard, leading to low survival after transplantation and lack of control of differentiation of stem cells. For gene therapy, the use of viral vectors to deliver genetic material into cells has concerns with immunogenicity, cytotoxicity, and genomic integration depending on the type of virus that is used. To this end, there is a need to develop novel tools and technologies to improve cell and gene therapies. Nanotechnology is an interesting field of study due to the unique physical and chemical properties that can be ascertained when synthesizing materials on the nanoscale. In addition, development of nanotechnologies allows researchers to interact with various biomolecules such as proteins and DNA on the nanoscale which allows for unprecedented control over the study and manipulation of these biomolecules. Therefore, nanomaterial make an ideal candidate for enhancing the development of cell and gene therapies for central nervous system disorders. In this dissertation, I will present some of the key background regarding nanotechnology as well as new developments that my colleagues and I have developed during my time in graduate school regarding enhancing cell and gene therapies for translational medicine.