Biomaterials, spinal cord injury, and rehabilitation: A new narrative

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is the most frequent disabling injury among spine diseases generating important personal, societal, and economic costs. Nowadays, the only accepted treatment is represented by systemic administration of methylprednisolone that unluckily carriers heavy side effects that sometimes are not so manageable in terms of balance with efficacy. The most probable reason for these disappointing results could be sought in SCI progression itself: SCI is characterized by a temporal development of biochemical pathways of degeneration and it is reasonable to think that different therapeutic targets should be considered. This chapter aims to describe the different possibilities behind the use of biomaterials (hydrogels, scaffolds, and colloids) in the treatment of SCI. This approach is highly interdisciplinary and involves not only medicine and biology but mostly chemistry, physics, and engineering. The interdisciplinary research proposed here allows to look at this complex problem from an unconventional perspective, developing smart cells or drug delivery systems, providing local multiple administrations able to reduce systemic side effects of single treatments and synergize their treatment efficacy.