Decisions about what experimental therapies are advanced to clinical trials are based almost exclusively on findings in preclinical animal studies. Over the past 30 years, animal models have forecast the success of hundreds of neuroprotective pharmacological therapies for stroke, Alzheimer׳s disease, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Yet almost withou...

Brain injury and neuronal loss leads to an inflammatory response, which is initiated by the innate immune system. To what extent this immune response is beneficial or detrimental for neurogenesis and regeneration is unclear. We addressed this question during regeneration of dopamine neurons in the adult salamander brain. In contrast to mammals, ablation of dopamine neurons evokes robust neuroge...

Tissue engineering approaches for expanding, differentiating and engrafting embryonic or adult stem cells have significant potential for tissue repair but harnessing endogenous stem cell populations offers numerous advantages over these approaches. There has been rapid basic biological progress in the identification of stem cell niches throughout the body and the molecular factors that regulate...

Xinhua Zhang,1,2,4 Zheng Zhou,2 Dakui Wang,2,3 Aiqun Li,1 Yanqing Yin,2 Xiaosong Gu,3 Fei Ding,3 Xuechu Zhen,5 and Jiawei Zhou2 1Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology, Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, 2Institute of Neuroscience, State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China, 3Jiangsu Key Laborator...

UNLABELLED Although the initial concepts of stem cell therapy aimed at replacing lost tissue, more recent evidence has suggested that stem and progenitor cells alike promote postischemic neurological recovery by secreted factors that restore the injured brain's capacity to reshape. Specifically, extracellular vesicles (EVs) derived from stem cells such as exosomes have recently been suggested t...