But many researchers and groups have persisted in urging such funding, saying embryonic stem cells hold the best potential for medical research. They also say some of the older stem cell lines funded under Bush’s policy have been contaminated and are not as useful as producing new ones would be.
Ratajczak’s recent discovery show that the newly identified adult stem cells appear to act like embryonic stem cells. He first described a strategy for identifying and isolating them in a 2004 issue of the journal Leukemia. But that earlier research also showed that VSELs are very rare and difficult to grow in a laboratory.
The research announced yesterday appears to show that VSELs can be grown in the laboratory, multiply into clusters of cells and then be coerced to change into other types of cells, such as brain or heart-muscle cells.
In experiments, the team extracted bone marrow from adult mice, put them into a cell sorter to extract the VSELs, put those cells into a petri dish, and then activated them, using a confidential process that is part of a patent application by UofL.
The cells were then exposed to chemicals generated by the mouse’s body called “factors” and changed into cardiac muscle cells, pancreatic cells, nerve cells and brain cells.
“We’ve established how to isolate and how to unleash the power of this cell,” said Ratajczak, who has worked at UofL since 2001.
The patent application, made last Thursday, refers to isolating the VSELs, purifying them and unleashing their power.
Dr. Donald Miller, director of the cancer center, would not say how much money went into Ratajczak’s research—although he did say that the university “invested heavily” to bring Ratajczak’s team to Louisville and that the group received two National Institutes of Health grants to support research in the past six months.
“This is an early observation, but we’re terribly excited about it and what it means in the future,” Miller said. “It certainly has potential for many types of diseases.”
A spokeswoman for the National Institutes of Health and the chairman of the agency’s stem cell task force would not comment on Ratajaczak’s research because he has not had a chance to study it.
But others agreed the discovery could have wide-ranging implications—especially if VSELs in humans can do what VSELs in mice have been made to do.
“It would certainly be very exciting to be able to transform them, convert them into other cells.
Also from the Internet—ed
NEW HOPE FOR SPINAL CORD INJURY PATIENTS
Tiny nerves taken from the rib cage, fortified with a powerful growth inducer and transplanted in the spinal cord significantly reversed paralysis in rats with spinal cord injuries.
That’s the finding of a study in the October issue of the Journal of Neurotrama. The study shows that nerve cells can be inserted and stimulated to grow in damaged areas of the spinal cord, and the discovery may lead to improved treatments for people with spinal cord injuries.
Using this method, researchers from the University of California-Irvine (UCI) and the Long Beach Veterans Administration Medical Center were able to partially restore hind leg movement in rats with severed spinal cords.
“By using tiny nerves from the rib cage as cables connecting the severed spinal cord, we were able to get some improvement in leg function,” says Dr. Vernon Lin, a professor of physical medicine at UCI and director of the Spinal Cord Injury Group at the Long Beach V.A.
“Regeneration is considered very difficult because the damaged area apparently inhibits growth of new nerve cell connections. This study gets us closer to arriving at the right combination of growth factors, nerve cells and physical stimulation to overcome these inhibitions and successfully treat spinal cord injury,” Lin says.
The growth inducer used in this study, a molecule called aFGF, is found in most nerve cells.
The rats with severed spinal cords that received both a FGF and the nerve grafts were able to move their hind legs after treatment. Rats that received either a FGF or nerve cell grafts alone had nearly no improvement, the study says.
HOPE OF WALKING FOLLOWS SURGERY By Alan Bavley
Christopher Schmeider is expected home tonight from China, filled with hope that he will one day walk again.
The 18-year-old Louisburg, Kansas, man was paralyzed from the chest down last year in an accident that damaged his spinal cord.
On Thanksgiving Day, he underwent a procedure at a hospital on the western outskirts of Beijing which injected cells from aborted fetuses into his spine to
