Smart-responsive electrospun scaffolds (SRES) for neural repair: Recent advances and future prospects

Neurological injuries trigger complex, multi-stage pathological cascades, while traditional clinical interventions such as drug therapy and surgical decompression can only alleviate symptoms rather than reconstruct damaged neural circuits. Conventional repair approaches face multiple limitations, including the inherently weak regenerative ability of central nervous neurons, glial scar formation post-injury, shortage of autologous nerve grafts, donor site secondary trauma and tissue size mismatch, which urgently demand novel regenerative therapeutic strategies. Tissue-engineered artificial nerve implants have opened new avenues for neural repair, among which smart-responsive electrospun scaffolds (SRES) stand out for their unique biomimetic advantage of actively sensing pathological microenvironment signals and dynamically modulating local repair conditions, greatly expanding the development of neural regenerative medicine. Benefiting from electrospinning technology, SRES have been developed targeting traumatic brain injury (TBI), spinal cord injury (SCI) and peripheral nerve injury (PNI), which realize spatiotemporally controllable drug release, biomimetic extracellular matrix construction and in-situ neuromodulation. However, a comprehensive and systematic review that integrates these scattered advancements to provide guidance for researchers remains absent. This review firstly elaborates the pathological characteristics of three typical neural injuries (TBI, SCI, PNI) and the endogenous self-repair defects of neural tissues. Afterwards, it systematically summarizes the classification of electrospinning technologies, fabrication methodologies, responsive mechanisms, and classifications of SRES, further focuses on their recent application progress in neural regeneration via bibliometric big data analysis over the past decade, critically analyzes current limitations and prospective research trends, and underscores the necessity of developing tailored electrospun smart-responsive materials, thereby offering an authoritative reference for advancing neural regeneration engineering and regenerative medicine.