Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Stem cells get brainy

Another breakthru in adult stem cell research...

WASHINGTON -- Scientists working in mice said they had found a way to identify master cells in the brain and grow them in large batches -- a potential way of helping patients grow their own brain tissue transplants....

This is important, since using stem cells from another person, including fetal cells, has a different DNA, and might be rejected by the immune system...
These so-called adult stem cells could come from a patient himself so no donor and no immune-system-suppressing drugs would be needed.....

"It's like an assembly line to manufacture and increase the number of brain cells," said Dr. Bjorn Scheffler, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida who led the study.

"We can basically take these cells and freeze them until we need them. Then we thaw them, begin a cell-generating process, and produce a ton of new neurons."

The hope is to use such cells to treat brain disease.

And, of course, the article ends with the PC argument:
Another potential source of stem cells comes from early human embryos, either taken from fertility clinics or made using cloning technology and perhaps a patient's own genetic
material.

Translation: getting stem cells from a patient would solve the immune problem, and instead of getting 12 stem cells per fetus, and having to grow them for 12 generations (with the risk of cancer) and probably having to clone them so the DNA will match, we can freeze dry a couple thousand from a tiny brain biopsy, grow them 2 or 3 generations then place them back: Cheaper and easier, but I have to mention embryonic stem cells because they are pc in the newspaper industry...

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