Graft repair of a peripheral nerve without the sacrifice of a healthy donor nerve by the use of acutely dissociated autologous Schwann cells.
We hypothesised that pieces of nerve that are normally trimmed away during graft repair could be a source of Schwann cells and used to create an autologous cell-containing nerve graft. To test the idea a transsection injury was made on the rat sciatic nerve. Seven days later, pieces from the proximal and distal stumps were used for the immediate isolation of its non-neuronal cells. These cells, of