Optimization of a human interneuron cell therapy for traumatic brain injury

Our overall goal is to develop MGE cell transplantation as a safe and effective therapy for traumatic brain injury (TBI). During the current reporting period, we performed studies to evaluate human MGE progenitors transplanted into the traumatically injured mouse brain. Our results show that human interneuron cell grafts were consistent and reproducible from animal to animal, migrate as expected and survived long-term in the brain injured hippocampus. Transplanted human interneurons are by far the most migratory human neuron type to be transplanted into a pre-clinical model of TBI. Engraftment was even more robust than what we have previously observed using mouse MGE cells (Zhu et al., Nature Communications, 2019).  This early phenotyping of the grafted human cells is consistent with what we expect from mouse studies, and we are continuing our studies to test the effect of cell grafts on seizures and memory after TBI.