Like stroke, spinal cord injury (SCI) has been a target of considerable interest for cell-based therapeutics. Indeed, some of the first studies of stem cell therapy of CNS disorders were focused on animal models of spinal cord injury, and the first use of human ES cell-derivatives in humans was that of hESC-derived putative oligodendrocyte progenitor cells for SCI (Priest et al., 2015). Yet these efforts, and those using OPCs in particular, were not necessarily well-matched to the reality of clinical SCI (Bretzner et al., 2011). Cord injuries are remarkably heterogeneous, and every case is unique from the standpoint of its individual pathology, which depends upon the nature and timing of the injury, the force vectors applied to the cord and surrounding vertebral bodies, the local segmental blood supply and its interruption, and the presence of local root avulsions or hemorrhage within the cord, and whether the cord was penetrated, among other considerations. At its most basic though, non-transective traumatic spinal cord injury is in large part a disorder of post-injury tissue edema occurring within a closed space – the spinal
