Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) affects millions of people of all ages around the world and can potentially lead to irreversible cognitive and motor damage without any immediate therapeutics available. There is a significant demand for physiologically relevant in vitro models of SCI. The major modeling challenge is to accurately perform the injury only on the neurites without affecting cell viability and to apply the pre-clinical stage compounds on compartment of interest only.

We have developed at NETRI microfluidic devices with a triangular architecture to isolate neurites and somas and to monitor neurite growth in time.