"Neurosurgery has traditionally been a field of ablation, one of excising or eliminating a lesion, albeit very precisely, delicately, and elegantly. Here we have a new reason to hope that, one day, there could be neuroregeneration - a new mode of therapy where we could replenish brain function that has been lost through either neurologic disease or its subsequent surgical treatment," says the lead author of the study, Nader Sanai, MD, a UCSF resident neurosurgeon and neuroscientist in the laboratory of senior author Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, PhD, UCSF professor of neurological surgery.
"We want to figure out what makes the astrocytes in the subventricular zone special," says Sanai. "Are there other astrocytes in the human brain with the potential to function as stem cells? If we identify the necessary molecular signals, can we unlock this potential in normal astrocytes and make them function as stem cells? The clinical implications of these concepts are at once fascinating and potentially powerful."
Exploring the origin of glial brain tumors
On another clinical front, the team is investigating whether disregulated astrocytic stem cells could be the cause of the most common type of human brain tumor, the glioma, which is thought to be derived from astrocytes. Because these cancers generally are not detected until they are advanced, when symptoms have begun to develop, scientists do not know where - or what - initiates the process of uncontrolled cell replication that leads to the formation of these brain tumors. Some evidence sugge
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Contact: Jennifer OBrien
415-476-2557
University of California - San Francisco
18-Feb-2004