Chitosan Tubes Prefilled with Aligned Fibrin Nanofiber Hydrogel Enhance Facial Nerve Regeneration in Rabbits

Abstract

Facial nerves are fragile and easily injured, for example, by traffic accidents or operations. Facial nerve injury drastically reduces the quality of life in affected patients, and its treatment presents clinical challenges. A promising therapeutic strategy includes nerve conduits with appropriate fillers capable of guiding nerve regeneration. In this study, a three-dimensional hierarchically aligned fibrin nanofiber hydrogel (AFG) assembled via electrospinning and molecular self-assembly was first used to mimic the architecture of the native fibrin cable, which is similar to the nerve extracellular matrix (ECM). AFG as a substrate in chitosan tubes (CST) was used to bridge a 7 mm-long gap in a rabbit buccal branch facial nerve defect model. The results showed that AFG and CST showed good compatibility to support the adhesion, activity, and proliferation of Schwann cells (SCs). Further morphological, histological, and functional analyses demonstrated that the regenerative outcome of AFG-prefilled CST was close to that of autologous nerve grafts and superior to that of CST alone or CSTs prefilled with random fibrin nanofiber hydrogel (RFG), which indicated that AFG-prefilled CST markedly improved axonal regeneration with enhanced remyelination and functional recovery, thus showing great potential for clinical application for facial nerve regeneration treatments.