Repair spinal cord injury with a versatile anti-oxidant and neural regenerative nanoplatform

Abstract Spinal cord injury (SCI) often results in motor and sensory deficits, or even paralysis. Due to the role of the cascade reaction, the effect of excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the early and middle stages of SCI severely damage neurons, and most antioxidants cannot consistently eliminate ROS at non-toxic doses, which leads to a huge compromise in antioxidant treatment of SCI. Selenium nanoparticles (SeNPs) have excellent ROS scavenging bioactivity, but the toxicity control problem limits the therapeutic window. Here, we propose a synergistic therapeutic strategy of SeNPs encapsulated by ZIF-8 (SeNPs@ZIF-8) to obtain synergistic ROS scavenging activity. Three different spatial structures of SeNPs@ZIF-8 were synthesized and coated with ferrostatin-1, a ferroptosis inhibitor (FSZ NPs), to achieve enhanced anti-oxidant and anti-ferroptosis activity without toxicity. FSZ NPs promoted the maintenance of mitochondrial homeostasis, thereby regulating the expression of inflammatory factors and promoting the polarization of macrophages into M2 phenotype. In addition, the FSZ NPs presented strong abilities to promote neuronal maturation and axon growth through activating the WNT4-dependent pathways, while prevented glial scar formation. The current study demonstrates the powerful and versatile bioactive functions of FSZ NPs for SCI treatment and offers inspiration for other neural injury diseases.