Posted on 03/29/2005 5:39:45 PM PST by Founding Father
Making Brain Cells
Scientists have announced they've found a way to coax adult hair follicle stem cells into becoming brain cells.
Hair-brained?
Scientists at AntiCancer, Inc. of San Diego have coaxed adult stem cells in mice into turning into neurons, the nerve cells of the brain. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors say, the results of their work suggests a new "source of undifferentiated multi-potent stem cells."
Stem cells are different from other cells because they can change into specialized cells the body needs, the body maintain and repair itself. Many scientists are working to grow tissue from adult stem cells in order to avoid the ethical and legal controversies surrounding embryonic stem cells. In hair follicles, stem cells are found in a small bulge on the side of the hair follicle. They used to help the follicle maintain itself.
"By luck," is how AntiCancer President Robert Hoffman describes finding the link between hair follicle stem cells and the brain. He shows off a hairless mouse that's at the center of the research. Under special light it glows bright green, like a child's toy.
"What we wanted to do was image the stem cells in the brain," Hoffman explains. To do that they used a gene that makes jellyfish glow under fluorescent light. By linking the gene to a protein called "nestin" which is a protein in brain cells. Hoffman says the then put the mouse into an imager, "hoping to see the brain." Instead, he says, "all we could see was the green fluorescence of the skin. So we know that nestin must be expressed in the skin because the green fluorescent protein was expressed and they're linked. When they saw that the hair follicles were glowing brightly Hoffman says, "we knew at that point that there was a relationship between the stem cells of the hair follicle and the stem cells of the brain."
The next steps would be to better understand and isolate the hair follicle stem cells, and then move on to the tricky part of trying to actually grow these stem cells in the lab. "We put them in culture," says Hoffman, "and under conditions where brain stem cells would form neurons, the hair follicle stem cells also formed neurons. We also injected some of these stem cells into the skin of mice and they formed neurons there, too."
Hoffman says there are important implications to his company's discovery. He says, "If this turns out to be easy to do and we can make lots of stem cells and grow them and have a large amount of them and they readily form neurons in vivo
by Jack Penland
There's something wrong about this, but I'm not sure what it is yet.
"There's something wrong about this, but I'm not sure what it is yet."
This is why we follically challenged folks are smarter!
So, wait a minute......Terri could be helped?
The TriStem Group has been set up by Mr.Ghazi Dhoot and Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel to further research and develop its retrodifferentiation technology which is used to create stem cells from mature adult cells. The retrodifferentiation technology is based on the results of 12 years of research and currently TriStem is the only company that owns, and is in the process of commercialising, this technology. The main advantage of TriStem's new process over existing methods of harvesting stem cells is that it provides large quantities of stem cells which are by definition DNA matched and, therefore, bypasses the political and ethical issues concerned with therapeutic cloning.
Thanks for the post; Ping.
Where are the champions of the advances of the medical arts in relation to Terri's situation?
I read about a procedure exactly like this out of a book that was written 20 years ago. "The Body Electric" by Dr. Robert O. Becker M.D.
Sure. Something can always be done, improvement is always possible. Where there is life there is hope. Does she need some fresh brain cells? Who knows. They say her cerebral cortex is pea soup, but they can't know that at this point. She might have plenty of brain cells already and making more might not be the answer. Suppose they could grow a new brain in a lab and transplant it. Should they do this, or when would they do this? Would they do this for the Pope or the President? Would they do this for the weird kid that lives down the street?
You want your brain turned into hair? Would the hair grow out the ears so you could combover?
LOL...No, just harvest a few neurons and transplant them on top where they'll grow into a real "smart" do!
I would pass on that. They would have to open the cranial cavity at least for orthoscopic surgery and like they say, once the air hits the brain nothing is quite the same.
Disagree. I've met quite a few brain surgery patients and they were all quite normal. In fact most were better than they were previously (epilepsy cured by temporal lobectomy to remove seizure focus)
Please ping your list. This is very interesting!
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
ping
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