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Home » Genetics & Stem Cells News

Stem Cell Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injury Repair

by Sreeraman on September 21, 2008 at 10:30 AM Genetics & Stem Cells News

Researchers from Rochester, N.Y., and Colorado have revealed that manipulating stem cells prior to transplantation may lead to improved spinal cord repair methods.

This would help victims of paralysis to recover without the risk of transplant-induced pain syndromes.

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The research team focussed their study on astrocytes cells that play a major role in the central nervous system.

When nerve fibres are injured in the spinal cord, the severed ends of the nerve fibres fail to regenerate and reconnect with the nervous system circuitry beyond the site of the injury.

During early development, astrocytes are highly supportive of nerve fibre growth, and scientists believe that if properly directed, these cells could play a key role in regenerating damaged nerves in the spinal cord.

Rather than transplanting naive stem cells, the team has adopted an approach of pre-differentiating stem cells into better-defined populations of brain cells. These are then selected for their ability to promote recovery.

The Rochester team used glial restricted precursor (GRP) cells - a population of stem cells that can give rise to several different types of brain cell that were induced to make two different astrocyte sub-types using different growth factors that promote cell formation during normal development.

The two types of astrocytes thus created were transplanted into the injured spinal cords of rats by the research team consisting Stephen Davies, Ph.D. and Jeannette Davies, Ph.D. They found dramatically different outcomes

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madmico(Guest)

01/25/2009

Not very helpful...
Pls. try to make a site that we student researchers can download a free medical animations for school purposes. . . asap..

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guest

09/29/2008

How much longer do we have to wait ? It seems that if you a lab rat you have a gr8ter chance of walking than if you are human ! We put man on the moon , have enough power to destroy life yet Govt's around teh world are more interested in their ego's than helping people to walk again! Why are there such large defense budgets and so little for medical research ? the spinal cord & related injury is the last frontier of science why is it taking more than 30 years to find a solution.

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