Stem Cells Cure Paralyzed Rats

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article on Forbes as well as other sources, 'Scientists have used [embryonic] stem cells and a soup of nerve-friendly chemicals to not just bridge a damaged spinal cord but actually regrow the circuitry needed to move a muscle, helping partially paralyzed rats walk.'"

Comments

Re:If only...

[oudzeeman]

Interesting that she is allowed to keep a rodent pet when she works in a laboratory, even though the rodent originally came from the lab...I work at a genetics research laboratory, and I'm not allowed to keep mice, rats, guinepigs, or hampsters as a pet at home, or keep any animal as a pet that eats any of the forementioned rodents as its normal food (cats are okay, even though they might occasionally catch mice).

The fear is that someone could introduce a parasite, virus, or bacterial infection into one of the mouse colonies, which would be devistating to our research (http://www.jax.org/research/research_areas.html), and our mouse business (http://jaxmice.jax.org/index.html). I don't handle the lab mice, or even come in close proximity of the mice on a regular basis since I'm a software engineer and this restriction still applies to me.

Actually

[Shivetya]

getting the government out of the way has opened more doors.

many don't realize the numbers of restrictions and amounts of red tape that come with government funding. So while the motive for limiting federal participation in stem cells may be political/religous/etc in basis it does also follow the theme of letting private industry take the risks and reap the rewards.

making people well is big business but along with that comes great cost and time. Innovations come from those who are not bound by restrictions and having the government looking over one's shoulder.

look at it this way, with private entities doing the work, competeing with each other, we will may end up with different cures for the same problems allowing a broader range of people to benefit. we also have multiple avenues to not being impacted in the future by the government agencies as the work was performed in the free market.

Re:Reconnecting Nerves is like hand soldering

[bsartist]

But having some movement/sensation is good

I think you've underestimated the level of improvement. I saw a before/after video of this on last night's network news. Before the treatment, the rat's back half was totally paralyzed. After, it was completely mobile, although it did look like one leg was a little stiff. So we're not talking about just being able to wiggle a few toes here, we're talking about getting up and walking around, albeit with a bit of a limp.

A better link for that video would be appreciated, btw - the above requires IE and MS Media Player.

University of Louisville method

[jbeaupre]

I like this approach better: http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic le?AID=/20060308/NEWS01/60308003

I've met these folks. They are getting great results with procedure that is easy to duplicate AND the method uses the patient's own cells. Not only does that avoid the pesky ethics issues, there's no tissue rejection issues.

Re:For those

[SargeantLobes]

Unfortunately, this particular lab was working with curly-wing and wingless mutants, so the freed flies took a few tottering steps, then fell out of their open tubes and collected on the floor.

Lab animals being set free often end up like that. They've been in labs for their entire lifespan (which is required, because all the variables need to be known and controllable), and they don't know how to fend for them selves. All those mice being set free usually just curl up somewhere and die. They don't really know how to look for food (they just nibble everything), and they don't know to run from predators.

Animal rights activists don't usually know anything about animals/nature. Animal rights acivists got egg collecting (from a rare species of bird, that lays it's eggs in fields) banned here last year. What they didn't know was, that when the colletors collected the first batch (which usually freezes to death) they put a flag near the nests so the farmer wouldn't drive over it. So all those years it was the egg collecting sustaining their existance (farmers don't go around putting flags near nests just for the heck of it, they've go 'better' things to do.