Skin stem cells used to mend spines of rats

[TheSeeker]

Christopher Reeve would definitely have approved of this:

A Toronto-led team of researchers has found a way to use stem cells derived from skin to treat spinal cord injuries in rats.





The finding lends promise to the idea that stem cells could one day be used to heal spinal cord injuries in humans, helping thousands of Canadians to walk again.





Injured rats injected with skin-derived stem cells regained mobility and had better walking co-ordination, according to the study published yesterday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The skin-derived stem cells, injected directly into the injured rats' spinal cords, were able to survive in their new location and set off a flurry of activity, helping to heal the cavity in the cord.

The complete article can be found here.

I really hope they can make this work. Imagine the rapture someone who has been paralyzed for years would feel when they can even just wiggle their toes again and feel someone caressing their arm!

 

[farmkid]

This is good news and a leap forward. Hopefully it will advance to the point where it can be used to treat people with spinal cord injuries. However, it may not be able to help people with old spinal cord injuries. In this study, the rats were treated with the cells only 7 days after the spinal cord injury was induced. The wound was still fresh and the the area hadn't yet been filled with scar tissue and the muscles had not yet atrophied.

 

[Zachary Smith]

farmkid said:
This is good news and a leap forward. Hopefully it will advance to the point where it can be used to treat people with spinal cord injuries. However, it may not be able to help people with old spinal cord injuries. In this study, the rats were treated with the cells only 7 days after the spinal cord injury was induced. The wound was still fresh and the the area hadn't yet been filled with scar tissue and the muscles had not yet atrophied.

I've read about this limitation before--that old injuries have generated scar tissue that disallows the penetration of new nerve growth. I can't help wonder though if it might be possible, for patients with old injuries, to use microsurgery to "clean" the area of the scar tissue--in effect, introduce new damage and THEN utilize the healing properties of these new treatments.

 

[farmkid]

Zachary Smith said:
I've read about this limitation before--that old injuries have generated scar tissue that disallows the penetration of new nerve growth. I can't help wonder though if it might be possible, for patients with old injuries, to use microsurgery to "clean" the area of the scar tissue--in effect, introduce new damage and THEN utilize the healing properties of these new treatments.

It sounds like it might work, or at least give the treatment a chance to work. However, there would still be the muscle atrophy to deal with. In the case of a person paralyzed for a long time, I believe the muscle tissue is essentially gone. Ideally, after such an injury, the person should begin receiving regular electrostimulation of thier muscles to maintain them in case a treatment such as this becomes available.

 

[Brent]

This is AWESOME

Freda Miller, a senior scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children and lead author of the study, said skin-derived stem cells have some advantages over other stem cell types. Scientists who use skin to generate stem cells do not need to use embryos, for example, and skin-derived stem cells can potentially be harvested from patients themselves, she said.

Sounds like a lot of untapped potential

 

[farmkid]

Brent said:
This is AWESOME

Freda Miller, a senior scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children and lead author of the study, said skin-derived stem cells have some advantages over other stem cell types. Scientists who use skin to generate stem cells do not need to use embryos, for example, and skin-derived stem cells can potentially be harvested from patients themselves, she said.

Sounds like a lot of untapped potential

The cells used in this study are one of the many types of adult stem cells. From the journal article:

Skin-derived precursors (SKPs) are a self-renewing, multipotent precursor that resides within the dermis of both rodents and humans. SKPs, which are generated during embryogenesis and persist into adulthood, share characteristics with embryonic neural crest stem cells, including their ability to differentiate into neural crest-derived cell types such as peripheral neurons and SCs.

There is a lot of potential in adult stem cells, and several are currently being investigated as potential treatments. The limitation of adult stem cells is that they are not as multipotent as embryonic stem cells, in other words, they don't have the potential to differentiate into as many different cell types. OTOH, adult stem cells permit the use of the patients own cells as the source, eliminating the potential for rejection by the immune system that embryonic stem cells have.

This summer, researchers reported that they had found a way to de-differentiate fully differentiate cells to a state indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells. In other words, they used skin cells (if I remember right) as their source. They expressed for genes in the cells and the cells lost their differentiate phenotype and became, for all intents and purposes, embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells can be injected into the inner cell mass of a blastocyst (an early stage in embryonic development) and contribute to all the tissues of the resulting animal. As confimation of the potential of these cells, in a later paper, these de-differentiate stem cells were used to create a chimeric mouse, just as embryonic stem cells do.

Personally, I think this technology has the greatest potential for use as a treatment because any cell type could potentially be used. It will be easier to harvest skin cells from a patient than to get stem cells from the blood or marrow or wherever, and those cells are more multipotent than adult stem cells.

 

[Charlie Kelly]

Although the use of skin stem cells is news, they mended spines of rats with stem cells years ago. At least, I'm sure I remember watching a documentary about it years ago.

The potential for stem cells is amazing though. They really could revolutionise medicine.

Charlie

 

[Johnny Rico]

TheSeeker said:
Christopher Reeve would definitely have approved of this:

A Toronto-led team of researchers has found a way to use stem cells derived from skin to treat spinal cord injuries in rats.





The finding lends promise to the idea that stem cells could one day be used to heal spinal cord injuries in humans, helping thousands of Canadians to walk again.





Injured rats injected with skin-derived stem cells regained mobility and had better walking co-ordination, according to the study published yesterday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The skin-derived stem cells, injected directly into the injured rats' spinal cords, were able to survive in their new location and set off a flurry of activity, helping to heal the cavity in the cord.

The complete article can be found here.

I really hope they can make this work. Imagine the rapture someone who has been paralyzed for years would feel when they can even just wiggle their toes again and feel someone caressing their arm!

As a 9-year C6-C7 injury patient myself, I hope to God that this may work. I walk now with crutches, but would love to get full function back.

 

[Zachary Smith]

Johnny Rico said:

TheSeeker said:
Christopher Reeve would definitely have approved of this:

A Toronto-led team of researchers has found a way to use stem cells derived from skin to treat spinal cord injuries in rats.





The finding lends promise to the idea that stem cells could one day be used to heal spinal cord injuries in humans, helping thousands of Canadians to walk again.





Injured rats injected with skin-derived stem cells regained mobility and had better walking co-ordination, according to the study published yesterday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The skin-derived stem cells, injected directly into the injured rats' spinal cords, were able to survive in their new location and set off a flurry of activity, helping to heal the cavity in the cord.

The complete article can be found here.

I really hope they can make this work. Imagine the rapture someone who has been paralyzed for years would feel when they can even just wiggle their toes again and feel someone caressing their arm!

As a 9-year C6-C7 injury patient myself, I hope to God that this may work. I walk now with crutches, but would love to get full function back.

Hang in there Johnny. I really do believe some near-miraculous things will be showing up in the next several years. I honestly don't know why some people stand in the way of the sort of research that will likely change the world and will be the sort of advances that would have seemed impossible just a couple decades ago. Breakthroughs are on the way.