BONE marrow cells have been transformed into the cells that produce the vital insulation around nerves that is destroyed by multiple sclerosis. So could stem cells taken from a patient鈥檚 own bone marrow help repair at least some of the damage caused by this debilitating disease?
People with MS suffer from progressive weakness, and vision and memory problems as a result of the destruction of myelin, a protein that insulates nerves and is essential for the conduction of nerve impulses. It is myelin that gives the white matter in the brain its characteristic colour.
A team led by Bruce Brew at St Vincent鈥檚 Hospital in Sydney, Australia, extracted adult stem cells from human and mouse bone marrow, and injected them into the brains of mice with a disease resembling MS.
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鈥淲e鈥檝e been able to show that those stem cells differentiated into different sorts of brain cells, the most important of which was oligodendrocytes, the very cells that produce white matter,鈥� Brew told a press conference in Sydney last week. The findings suggest that patients 鈥渃ould conceivably have their deficits partly or wholly reversed鈥�, he said.
But the team has yet to show that these oligodendrocytes produce myelin and improve symptoms in the mice. Nor is it clear what stem cells they used or how they proved that the stem cells really did turn into oligodendrocytes. Brew has yet to publish details of the work, and none of the team returned 快猫短视频鈥檚 calls.
There has been a flurry of papers in recent years claiming adult stem cells can turn into this or that kind of cell, but many have come under fire for a lack of rigour. Just because a stem cell turns into something that looks like a brain cell, the critics argue, does not mean it can really function as one.
Even if the stem cells do form fully functional oligodendrocytes, it is not clear how well they would work. The stem cells homed in only on areas of recent damage, which might be of little help to long-term sufferers of MS.
What鈥檚 more, the mainstream view is that MS is an autoimmune disease caused by immune cells mistakenly attacking myelin. If so, any fresh myelin would also come under attack, so patients would have to keep taking drugs to suppress the immune system.
But if the stem cells really can replace lost myelin, Brew hopes the technique could be used to tackle other illnesses as well. 鈥淭here are a whole host of deficits that could potentially be helped,鈥� he says.
Other groups are also trying to find ways of repairing the damage caused by MS. A team at Yale University, for instance, recently transplanted myelin-producing cells from a nerve in the ankle of a patient into her brain. They have not yet announced any results.