LAUSR

Interventions in neonatal brain injury are best considered as neuroprotective or neurorestorative or both. In general, neuroprotective interventions prevent primary cellular injury or death, and neurorestorative interventions ameliorate or prevent the subsequent disturbances of brain maturation, i.e., hypomyelination, impaired neuronal development, altered connectivity, etc. The purposes of this commentary is to review briefly the neuroprotective and neurorestorative potential of stem cells, but particularly to discuss the recent evidence that stem cell-derived exosomes are the principal mediators of these beneficial effects and that these small vesicles could prove to realize the potential of stem cell therapy in perinatal brain disease.