As a result of these considerations, cell-based therapy of the injured spinal cord has more to do with the issues discussed in the cellular therapy of stroke rather than of myelin disease. As such, attempts to treat spinal cord injury, especially severe spinal injuries involving complete loss of function below given segmental levels, would seem unlikely to be effective if limited simply to the delivery of restricted phenotypes, such as OPCs. That said, other approaches to treat SCI using neural stem cells, in the hope that neurons generated from those NSCs might establish multi-synaptic networks able to bypass regions of injury to restore distal innervation, have shown great promise (Nori et al., 2011; Tuszynski et al., 2014). These advances may be the harbingers of more effective approaches towards spinal cord repair, using grafted NSCs or lineage-restricted spinal neuronal progenitors (Roy et al., 2004). Once such local circuit reconstruction is accomplished, then adjunctive approaches such as olfactory ensheathing cell (Granger et al., 2012) and glial progenitor cell delivery (Buchet et al., 2011; Kawabata et al., 2016; Mozafari et al., 2015), respectively
