Nanomaterials-Assisted Engineering of Stem Cells for Brain Injury Repair

Brain injuries are one of the foremost causes of disability and mortality worldwide. These injuries involve mechanical damage to the nerve tissues and result in a wide range of abnormalities, including the loss of functional neurons and the disruption of the neural circuits. Currently, there are no effective therapies for the repair of brain injuries as the central nervous system has a very limited capacity to produce new neurons after injury. Stem cell-based therapy is a promising approach for repair of brain tissues through replacing the damaged neurons with newly differentiated ones. Although transplantation of neural stem cells shows a certain level of success in animal traumatic brain injury (TBI) or spinal cord injury (SCI) models, the therapeutic performance of this approach is considerably restricted by the low retention, survival, and undirected differentiation of the transplanted stem cells within the injured microenvironments.

Functional biomaterials exhibit unique advantages in regulating stem cell survival and differentiation, leveraging their tunable physicochemical properties and sustained drug release capabilities. However, achieving long-term, spatiotemporally targeted stimulation of dynamically engrafted cells via functional biomaterials remains a critical challenge. Herein, we report our recent progress on modulating the interface interactions between functional biomaterials and stem cells, to construct biomaterial-engineered stem cells for precise fate control in vivo and enhanced brain injury repair. Through precise engineering of material-cell interactions, we successfully assemble functional nanomaterials onto neural stem cells to enable their coordinated migration. These surface‑decorated nanomaterials can release bioactive therapeutic agents or generate wireless electrical stimuli upon exposure to external physical fields, which in turn exert persistent modulatory effects on the engineered stem cells. We have validated in animal models that these biomaterial‑engineered stem cells yield superior therapeutic outcomes for brain injury

Jichuan Qiu received his B.S. in applied chemistry in 2012 and Ph.D. in materials physics and chemistry in 2018, respectively, both from Shandong University. He joined Prof. Younan Xia’s group at the Department of Biomedical Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology as a visiting graduate student in 2016 and then continued as a postdoctoral fellow since 2018. In January of 2022, he joined the State Key Laboratory of Crystal Materials at Shandong University as a full professor. His research interests include rational design and synthesis of functional biomaterials for applications in tissue engineering, cell therapy, and neuromodulation. He has co-authored more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, and Angewandte Chemie International Edition, together with a total citation of over 5,000 and an h-index of 41. He received Rising Star Speaker Award of 11th International Conference on Materials for Advanced Technologies (2023) and serves as the members of the Neurorestorative Materials Branch, Brain-Machine Interface Biomaterials Branch, and Bio-Ceramics Branch of the Chinese Society for Biomaterials.