Biomedical engineers at Duke University have created an injectable material that turned the empty cavity left behind by a stroke into a place where new blood vessels and nerve fibers could grow, and mice treated with it recovered forelimb movement within eight weeks. The work has been done only in mice, and no version of it has been tested in a person.
The findings were published in the journal Cell Biomaterials. The material is a microporous annealed particle scaffold, made of hydrogel microparticles that assemble into a porous structure with open spaces that cells can enter and build within.
