"Transplantation of neural stem cells in mice three days after brain injury promotes the improvement of specific components of motor function," said Tracy K. McIntosh, PhD, professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, Director of Penn's Head Injury Center, and senior author of the study. "More importantly, these stem cells respond to signals and create replacement cells: both neurons, which transmit nerve signals, and glial cells, which serve many essential supportive roles in the nervous system."
If stem cells are blank slates, able to become any type of body cells, then neural stem cells (NSCs) are slates with the basics of neurology already written on them, waiting for signals in the nervous system to fill in the blanks. The NSCs used by McIntosh and his colleagues were cloned from mouse progenitor cells and grown in culture. The advantage of NSCs exists in their ability to easily incorporate themselves into their new environment in ways other types of transplants could not.
"If you put these cells into normal newborn mice, they would behave exactly like normal cells they create different neural cell types and they don't reproduce tumorigenically," said McIntosh. "In humans, the use of similar neural stem cells would avoid the ethical dilemmas posed by fetal stem cells and the limitations seen in cultures of cloned neurons."
In humans, traumatic brain injury is associated with disabilities
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Contact: Greg Lester
lesterg@uphs.upenn.edu
215-349-5658
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
1-Oct-2002