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In recent years, stem cell researchers have become very adept at manipulating the fate of adult stem cells cultured in the lab. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies achieved the same feat with adult neural stem cells still in place in the brain. They successfully coaxed mouse brain stem cells bound to join the neuronal network to differentiate into support cells instead. The discovery, which is published ahead of print on Nature Neuroscience's website, not only attests to the versatility of neural stem cells but also opens up new directions for the treatment of neurological diseases, such...

Neural stem cells shown in green, neurons in red. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Irvine) ScienceDaily (Nov. 2, 2007) — New UC Irvine research is among the first to demonstrate that neural stem cells may help to restore memory after brain damage. In the study, mice with brain injuries experienced enhanced memory -- similar to the level found in healthy mice -- up to three months after receiving a stem cell treatment. Scientists believe the stem cells secreted proteins called neurotrophins that protected vulnerable cells from death and rescued memory. This creates hope that a drug...

Stem cells taken from adult human bone marrow have been manipulated by scientists at the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to generate aggregates of cells called spheres that are similar to those derived from neural stem cells of the brain. In addition, the bone marrow-derived stem cells, which could be differentiated into neurons and other cells making up the central nervous system, spread far and wide and behaved like neural stem cells when transplanted into the brain tissue of chicken embryos. Results of the experiments, described in the February 2007 of the Journal of Neuroscience Research, support...

Stem cells and metastatic cancer: fatal attraction? It is widely hoped that neural stem cells will eventually be useful for replacing nerves damaged by degenerative diseases like Alzheimer disease and multiple sclerosis. But there may also be another use for such stem cells--delivering anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells. A Perspective article in PLoS Medic ine, by Professor Riccardo Fodde (Erasmus Medical Center, The Netherlands), discusses a new study in mice, published in the launch issue of PLoS ONE (www.plosone.org), that showed that neural stem cells could be used to help deliver anti-cancer drugs to metastatic cancer cells. One of the...

DUARTE, Calif. -- Patients with advanced cancer that has spread to many different sites often do not have many treatment options, since they would be unable to tolerate the doses of treatment they would need to kill the tumors.  Researchers at City of Hope and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital may have found a way to treat cancers that have spread throughout the body more effectively. They used modified neural stem cells to activate and concentrate chemotherapeutic drugs predominately at tumor sites, so that normal tissue surrounding the tumor and throughout the body remain relatively unharmed."This approach could significantly improve...

Tracking Neural Stem Cells in Patients with Brain Trauma To the Editor: Regeneration of damaged brain tissue with neural stem cells is a promising strategy for reversing neurologic deficits.1 Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles have been used to label and track dendritic cells in the experimental treatment of melanoma2 and in experiments in animals.3 We report the feasibility of labeling neural stem cells from humans (two patients for whom written informed consent was provided by next of kin) with superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles and tracking them with the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). A 34-year-old man had brain trauma in...

Attaching a recently discovered cytokine to neural stem cells derived from bone marrow, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center's Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute have developed a tool to track and kill malignant brain tumor cells and provide long-term protection against their return. Results of an animal study are published in the March 1, 2006 issue of Cancer Research, and the researchers are now applying to regulatory agencies to translate their work into human clinical trials. Gliomas are highly invasive tumors with poorly defined borders that intermingle with healthy brain tissue, making complete surgical removal nearly impossible. Furthermore, cells separate from the...

New research in specially bred mice has elucidated how the antidepressant Prozac works. Scientists have long known that in addition to discouraging synapses from reabsorbing the neurotransmitter serotonin, Prozac (known generically as fluoxetine) also increases the number of neurons (neurogenesis) in the adult brain. But exactly how the drug manages this multiplication trick has proved difficult to pin down. Now researchers have traced the development cascade of new neurons and determined where fluoxetine exerts its multiplying--and beneficial--effect. Grigori Enikolopov at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and his colleagues bred a new strain of mice that allowed them to track the...