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Biotech / Medical : Neuroscience -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nigel bates who wrote (48)	9/8/2000 5:42:01 AM
From: scott_jiminez	Respond to of 278

Yeah, a bit of a rhetorical touch never fails to stir up some interest <g>. The ability to backwards engineer stem cells from any organ or system would relieve a multitude of political (ethical, moral) questions if the approach proves successful in generating appropriate and functional phenotypes. The Swedes - led by Anders Bjorklund, Ollie Lindvall, and Lars Olson - have been pioneers in conducting cell replacement studies for the CNS (primary focus - Parkinson's disease). The abstract of a review article by Bjorklund and Lindvall regarding CNS cell replacement ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10816308&dopt=Abstract Bjorklund also published this article last year, 'The use of neural stem cells for gene therapy in the central nervous system.' [J Gene Med 1999 May-Jun;1(3):223-6] Hope this helps a tiny bit. Scott

To: nigel bates who wrote (48)	9/8/2000 7:01:34 AM
From: scott_jiminez	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 278

Nigel - I forgot to mention: if you're interested in pursuing the neural stem cell story on the biotech/business front, two of the leading companies are 1. Layton Bioscience (http://www.laytonbio.com/) and 2. Diacrin (http://www.diacrin.com/). I am not endorsing these companies nor do I have a grasp of the integrity of their science (Diacrin recently had a porcine cell-transplant study for stroke put on hold due to complications in some of the patients). One other point about CNS stem cell therapy: a good deal of the success reported by Bjorklund et al. (in fetus-derived, dopaminergic (DA) cell replacement for Parkinson's (PD) patients) is believed to be the result of 'supporting cells - glia, non-DA neurons - which are part of the fetal graft and which help provide a rough approximation of the appropriate microenvironment for the DA cells to survive and function correctly. When preparing neural stems cells for a similar graft, the population consists almost entirely of the stem cells i.e. devoid of the 'contaminating' cells which, in the end, appear to be critical for significant functional enhancement. The studies that I'm familiar (rodent) suggest that the inter-study variability of positive functional outcomes is much higher with stem cell-derived DA neurons than similar work using 'normally' differentiated DA neurons from fetal tissue. The fetal cells consistently produce significantly higher rates of functional recovery in animal models of PD. Scott