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Nerve Cells Made From Blood Cells
BarbaraHudson writes: CBC reports that Canadian scientists are turning blood into nerve cells. They do so by manipulating stem cells that have been taken from a patient's blood, eventually switching them into neural stem cells (abstract). These can then give rise to multiple different nerve cells suitable for use in the rest of the body. Team leader Mick Bhatia said, "We can actually take a patient's blood sample, as routinely performed in a doctor's office, and with it we can produce one million sensory neurons. We can also make central nervous system cells." They're working on turning the neural stem cells into motor neurons for treatment of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
In most cases they would, the thinking is that once you can grown custom neurons outside of the body, you can also modify them to be resistant to or able to reverse the disorder. For example, what if you could re-engineer normal neurons from a patient with Huntington's disease. Injecting them back in, maybe they would replace some of the dying neurons and at least diminish the effects of the disease. If you could engineer glial cells that can properly transport beta-amyloid or are hyper effective at it, maybe they can compensate for cells that can't and slow down the progression of Alzheimer's to push it back beyond reasonable human lifespans. The other key idea is now you have a way of producing cells that carry the disease genes without having to cut open someone's brain to get at them. This is one of the first necessary tools to study and develope new treatments to fight these diseases for which no human-derived models exist. This is probably the likliest short term benefit of such technology (ie benefit in 10-20 years rather than 20-50 year timeframe) accelerating the pace of drug discovery.
The scientists that published that just must not be up on their literature or the author is just confused and the scientists are trying to talk up their research.