Rodent Spinal Cord Injury Model and Application of Neurotrophic Factors for Neuroprotection

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a serious clinical problem that causes lifetime disabilities to victims and inflicting huge social burden on our society. One of the main lacunae in developing potential therapeutic measures in SCI is a lack of suitable animal models that could be comparable to clinical situations. Thus, development of new animal models of SCI is highly needed to expand our knowledge on cell injury and repair process in order to reduce cord pathology, and in translating advanced therapies in patients of SCI to improve therapeutic strategies. Keeping these views in mind, a suitable animal model is developed in our laboratory that can be used to explore new therapeutic tools in SCI. The details of our methods used to induce SCI in rodents and neuroprotection achieved by use of selected neurotrophic factors are described in this chapter.