The neural stem cell project at Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Mansoura University is one of the projects funded by STDF, and aims to assess the possible use of human olfactory neural stem cells as possible cell-based therapy for spinal cord injury (SCI), Alzheimer's Disease (AD), and Parkinson's Disease (PD).

The project is scheduled to end by June 2014, and many important outcomes have been achieved till now including: registration of ten thesis in topics relevant to neural stem cells, establishment of stem cell lab: http://www.vetmansoura.com/project_videos.htm, build a research team of five specialized researches in the field of stem cells, and publication of 4 international papers, beside the preparation of three more: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Marei+HE

As important output of the project, two thesis had been defended at Monday February 10, 2014.

The first thesis, a Master thesis, presented by Dr. Shymaa Rezk was about the possible use of OBNSCs for cell-based therapy of SCI. The study had proved that adult human olfactory bulb neural stem cell expressing hNGF have succeeded to survive, and differentiate but fail to restore neural recovery in rat's model of spinal cord injury (SCI).

A second thesis, a Ph.D. thesis, presented by Dr. Amany Farag Ameen has proved that adult human olfactory bulb neural stem cells overexpression hNGF (hNGF-OBNSC) have succeeded to restore cognitive functional deficit in Ibotenic acid-Induced Alzheimer’s disease rat model.