Introduction: Global deficit of the organs suitable for therapeutic transplantation forces biomedical researchers to seek for alternative methods of human body repair. One of the possible solutions is the construction of functional organs or implantable tissue building blocks from the differentiated cells organs normally comprises by tissue engineering. Live cells derived from cadavers should be able to reproduce all the "bystander" neuroregenerative effects and offer the advantages of better immune matching, the highest available cell number, and lower costs associated with propagating cells in a laboratory at the required scale.

Methods: The cells were harvested from spinal cords of 6 animals (two time from death groups x 3 animals in group) slaughtered for food production outside of the University. Neural stem cells (NSCs) were collected 6-18hr postmortem after mild enzymatic digestion and magnetic separation. The ability of collected NSCs to differentiate into neurons, astrocytes and glial cells and yield/rate for each progeny cell types was assessed after exposing cells to differentiation media. NSCs were seeded into multielectrode arrays, their differentiation induced, and their spontaneous electric activity recorded.

Results: The collected NSCs were allowed to differentiate separately in astrocyte and neural differentiated media. Exposure to astrocyte differentiation media for eight days resulted in a ratio of 40/9/51% (astrocytes/neurons/undifferentiated and unclassified cells) by staining with antibodies against the neuronal marker neurofilament (NF) and the astrocyte marker glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), while neuronal differentiation media exposure resulted in a ratio of approximately 31/35/34%. The functional activity of neurons differentiated from cadaver harvested NSCs was assessed by spontaneous electrical activity bursts on multielectrode arrays (MEA). Goat cadaveric NSCs-derived neurons showed less spontaneous electrical activity than neurons differentiated from commercially available human iPSC-derived progenitors, but significantly higher than starting undifferentiated cells of both types.

Conclusion: Neural stem cells survive in refrigerated cadavers for a significant amount of time and can be differentiated into electrically-active mature neurons.