Skin Stem Cells Used to Mend Spines of Rats

The Toronto Star reports researchers have used adult skin stem cells to heal spinal cord injuries in rats. "Injured rats injected with skin-derived stem cells regained mobility and had better walking co-ordination, according to the study published yesterday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The skin-derived stem cells, injected directly into the injured rats' spinal cords, were able to survive in their new location and set off a flurry of activity, helping to heal the cavity in the cord."

Comments

Re:very nice

[DragonTHC]

no, but your penis will be able to walk again.

I say.

[Hsensei]

It has never been a better time to be a rat. no cancer or diabetes and now no paralasys.

Re:I say.

[Chris Burke]

It has never been a better time to be a rat. no cancer or diabetes and now no paralasys.

Except for the part where they first give you cancer, diabetes, and paralysis.

Re:I say.

[GeckoX]

And then you're only given a 50% chance of not being in the control group.

And that's still only beneficial if you're in the test group for the particular drug or therapy that actually works!

And even if you are that lucky, there's a more than probable chance that your reward for surviving all of that and getting 'cured', will be to be euthanized shortly thereafter.

Odds...they are not good for a lab rat.

Re:very nice

[Wonko the Sane]

can we enlarge my penis now with this technique?

The first time this happens, I predict federal funding of stem cell research to be approved by congress within 24 hours.

Lab Rats

[Perl-Pusher]

If humans were rats we would have cured all major illnesses by now. It seems everyday I read something that we have been able to cure or cause in rats. Unfortunately progress on humans has been much slower.

Re:Lab Rats

[iamacat]

Indicating that we need an informed human volunteer program. We ask people to risk their lives at war in another country, surely taking some risks to help millions in your own country is not out of the question? I would think risky experiments would be limited to those who stand to benefit from them or terminally ill who want to end their life on a meaningful note.

Re:Lab Rats

[geekoid]

There are process for doing just that. I forget the name.

Needless to say, it is a very complicated issue, and success in rats is a very good thing, but there are many more tests that need to be performed before it is ready for even the most basic human testing.
There have been many treatments and cures for mice that failed for a variety of reason before human testing.

Re:Lab Rats

[milamber3]

This already happens for quite a few diseases. Look at Stem Cells Inc. and their work with Batten's Disease. These children are going to die if nothing is done so they are doing approved trial with them. The problem with using the people who are most ill is that sometimes they die before you get all the information you need from the trial. Trials are expensive and time consuming already so that's a pretty big negative to overcome.

Re:Lab Rats

[tloh]

If humans were rats we would have cured all major illnesses by now.

Yes, but you would be a tiny part of a semi-formal, well-established, institutionalized breeding program. Your relatives would be your parents, siblings and cousins all at the same time due to inbreeding. You and your fellow rats would have been carefully designed genetically to custom physiological specifications so as to make experimenting easy and meaningful. Like for example, you would have no immune system so that foreign cells can be incubated inside your body without suffering tissue rejection issues. Or you would be genetically predisposed to some congenital disease so that drugs can be tested on you for effectiveness.

I say all this in jest, of course. It is important to realize that success with rats are accomplished only with the benefit of an incredible ammount of control excercised by researchers that translate very poorly to the realistic world human beings are living in. Beyond these initial animal trials, there are still an incredible number of hoops that medical researchers have to jump through before they can come up with something that is injectable into you.

Re:Lab Rats

[rucs_hack]

terminally ill who want to end their life on a meaningful note

They already do that. I had a friend who was diagnosed with a very nasty cancer that killed him in four months. Unfortunately his 'doctors' convinced him to allow them to test a drug on him. It helped him not a jot, a fact that they alluded to being likely (being of medical background I could read between the lines of what he was told), but never quite managed to explain clearly for him, and made him puke constantly. I did try to convince him to not take part, but they'd got him on the 'for the good of other people' thing. His was not the first case I encountered where this had occured, just the closest to me.

Terminally ill people make bad subjects. For one thing they're already dying, so your looking at a system in a failure condition, not much useful general data to be had there, and we are, after all, dealing with a person who may want to be doing other stuff in their last bit of time alive. They are also prone to being fragile of mind (not always, but it can happen in those who suddenly find they are dying young), so susceptible to being talked into things not in their best interests.

I'm against it, you may have gathered. Personally I think we should be growing brainless human bodies (as in never had a brain, never alive without external help), and test on them instead. Heck, we might even be able to cuts bits off them for people to use.

Re:Lab Rats

[notclevernickname]

Considering that in the U.S. alone, nearly two-thirds of all capital convictions are overturned, I don't think that is a very good idea. Also, there are about 3,000 inmates on death row right now, I'm pretty sure thats not enough for all of the medical procedures that are being developed today.

OK I'm confused.

[sakusha]

This makes no sense to me. I remember a long time ago (maybe 1976) when I was a pre-med student in college, I got a part time job at the hospital's Anaesthesiology Lab. Some of the doctors were always doing research on lab rats, it was my job to assist them (mostly doing computer data analysis). One day I saw a doctor doing some particularly nasty stuff to some rats, I asked him what he was doing. He said he was severing their spinal cords. I asked him why he was doing that. He told me that rats have a unique ability to partially repair their spinal cord even if it was completely severed. Then he showed me how he did it (not that I really wanted to see it). He made a little slice, a little snip, and crudely sewed the rat back up. I asked him why he didn't put some antibiotics in the wound or anything. He said, "well they're just rats." Sheesh. That was about the time I decided I didn't want to be a doctor.

So anyway, I was under the impression that rats already had the ability to repair their spinal cord even without the use of stem cells. Perhaps I've mis-remembered what the doctor/researcher said, does anyone know the details?

Re:OK I'm confused.

[notclevernickname]

While TFA doesn't specifically give evidence for your anecdote, it does mention that "Injured rats injected with skin-derived stem cells regained mobility and had better walking co-ordination..." which seems to imply that the rats without the stem cell treatment did partially repair themselves, but the rats treated with stem cells healed better.

Re:OK I'm confused.

[Colin Smith]

http://www.rds-online.org.uk/pages/page.asp?i_Page ID=145&i_ToolbarID=3

Apparently if the severance is incomplete they can regrow nerve fibres.

I thought humans could too though. I thought it was the scarring on the ends of the nerve fibres which prevented regrowth. My father severed the nerve in a finger, after several years it regrew and he could feel things again.

Re:OK I'm confused.

[TomorrowPlusX]

I'm not a neuroscientist -- but my girlfriend is. And I've watched her do the exact operation you described for the purpose of making illustrations for her papers ( I'm a graphic designer ). It was Gruesome. Anyway, I don't think it's that rats can heal their spinal cords. They can't. But, like us, they can heal damaged spinal cords up to a particular level of trauma, and since rats are the ubiquitous model for this reasearch, that level of trauma is reasonably well-understood.

So, a lot of this spinal work is done at that approximate trauma level; then when the rats are at different levels of healing they're "sacrificed" ( or "sacked", for short ) and then analysis of the cells at the damage point is done to better understand why that particular trauma level exists, such that ways can be determined to push it farther.

Rats?

[Das Auge]

Personally, I think we should just let the politicians die. But that's just me...

Re:very nice

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Federal funding of adult stem cell research already exists. It's the embryonic stem cell research that is forbidden in the United States; and despite being legal in other countries, has yet to achieve even ONE useful cure. Where Adult Stem Cells, like in TFA, are now up to 20 or 30 miracle cures of a variety of injuries from heart attacks to severed spine paralysis. One ASC researcher has even claimed that he can regenerate 30,000 human brains from a single Grey matter stem cell (though, one would suspect that any knowledge the donor had would not be so duplicated- after all growing nervous tissue does not create the connections between those nerves).

Cerebrospinal applications

[athloi]

Can they make idiots re-grow brains?

Re:Cerebrospinal applications

[MyLongNickName]

Can they make idiots re-grow brains?

When you get back from treatment, let us know.

chinese got there first

[crayz]

Sounds similar to the experimental (human) treatment being practiced in China. There's been a lot of skepticism about why/how such a thing could work, but according to a lot of people who've gone through the treatment it does restore some amount of functionality

Re:very nice

[Pentavirate]

It's the embryonic stem cell research that is forbidden in the United States

One little difference from what you said. Embryonic stem cell research is not forbidden in the United States. The federal government just won't fund it except from a couple of pre-existing stem cell lines (which I guess are corrupted and worthless now anyway). Lot's of embryonic stem cell research happens via private funds and is often even funded through states like California.

Everything else you said is spot on.

Scarring

[PIPBoy3000]

The other big issue is scarring. Nerves have a really hard time growing through scar tissue. What I was hoping to see in this article is how long the injuries were left untreated. If stem cells were cultivated before the injury and injected before scarring can occur, it's not going to be that helpful in real-life situations.

Re:Great Alternative to Controversy

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow, people have gotten a crazy notion into their heads: that adult and embryonic stem cells are mutually exclusive. It's like we can only research one and not the other! How absurd.

I've never heard anyone argue that research on adult stem cells should be halted. Yet more than one reply to this post suggests that it's common to believe that embryonic stem cells are the only useful ones to research. Have the anti-research crowd given up trying to argue logically? Are they now going to beat this "one or the other" straw man to death?

For this reason, it appears that the controversy will not end. Even if the embryonic cells don't come from an embryo, the research will be seen as "evil" because it (supposedly) diverts resources from adult stem cell research. But if they're both promising areas of research then they should both be funded, right? It is this little gem of common sense that has never been successfully refuted. It probably never will be refuted, because the opposition seems to be pretending that it doesn't exist.

Finally.

[proverbialcow]

At long last, Christopher Reeve will be able to walk again.

What's that you say? Ohhhh...

Re:very nice

[Clandestine_Blaze]

can we enlarge my penis now with this technique?

The first time this happens, I predict federal funding of stem cell research to be approved by congress within 24 hours. Naw, it'll face stiff resistance from the White House.

Re:Great Alternative to Controversy

[drawfour]

Why can't scientists use BOTH? It's quite possible that embryonic stem cells are better suited in some instances, and adult stem cells are better suited in others. There's no need to use one to the exclusion of the other.

So yes, embryonic stem cells _should_ be opened up to federal funding programs, so that advances can be made w/ either type of stem cell.

Re:very nice

[bensafrickingenius]

Another interesting point -- George W. Bush is the only president ever to provide any funding for embryonic stem cell research. Ever. And yet he gets his ass kicked for not expanding the funding to cover more cell lines.

No

[furbearntrout]

In this porno, YOU are the schoolgirl.