Institute of Experimental Medicine CAS

Published 13. 10. 2022

At the end of September, the international scientific conference Neurotechnologies, traditionally organized by Cell Press – publisher of prestigious scientific journals – took place in Leuven, Belgium. The conference focused on new technologies connecting neurobiology and biomedical engineering. These high-tech neurotechnologies are essential for understanding crucial questions in neuroscience research.

The conference featured a number of renowned speakers, such as Jocelyne Bloch (Lausanne University Hospital), Kobi Koffler (University of California San Diego), Sergiu Pasca (Stanford University), Nadine Gogolla (Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry), Cynthia Chestek (University of Michigan), Grégoire Courtine (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) and many others.

IEM CAS was represented by our PhD student Mgr. Kristýna Šintáková from the Department of Neuroregeneration, a detached workplace at the BIOCEV research center, who presented her research project with the title "Small extracellular vesicles derived from neural stem cells have an antiapoptotic effect on spinal cord injury in vitro" in the poster session. The project focuses on the research of brain and spinal cord injury.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating condition with a complicated pathology and lifelong consequences. Despite recent advances, there is still no effective treatment. Promising therapeutic approaches include the application of neural stem cells (NSCs), which have been shown to have neuroprotective and immunomodulatory effects in SCI. However, the exact mechanism of their action has not yet been satisfactorily explained. Based on published works and our previous research, we believe that the positive effect is mediated by small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) derived from NSCs (NSC-sEVs), mainly by miRNA molecules contained in these vesicles. To confirm this hypothesis, we evaluated the antiapoptotic effect of NSC-sEV in an in vitro model of SCI.