  Neurological diseases and injuries present some of the greatest challenges in
modern medicine, often causing irreversible and lifelong burdens in the people
whom they afflict. These diagnoses have devastating consequences on millions of
people each year, and yet there are currently no therapies or interventions
that can repair the structure of neural circuits and restore neural tissue
function in the brain and spinal cord. Despite the challenges of overcoming
these limitations, there are many new approaches under development that hold
much promise. Neural tissue engineering aims to restore and influence the
function of damaged or diseased neural tissue generally through the use of stem
cells and biomaterials. In this paper, several new 3D tissue constructs and
designs are described for functional reconstruction of neural architecture.
With the use of induced pluripotent stem cells or induced neuronal cells, these
3D constructs could then be studied as regional models of the central nervous
system or could one day be implemented as autologous grafts into damaged sites
of the nervous system in order to restore neural function, particularly for
damaged sites of spinal cord, areas of stroke infarction, tumor resection
sites, peripheral nerve injuries, or areas of neurodegeneration.
