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Nerve Cells Made From Blood Cells

Posted by Soulskill on from the beats-turning-water-into-wine dept.

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.

5 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases? by NotInHere · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you are researching in the Neuroscience field, you have a simple descision: either you accept that most grant money is inside the "curing Altzheimer" corner, and start constructing a story how your research can heal patients from Altzheimer, Parkinson or HIV, or you are heroic and don't get grant money. Your competition does get the money though, so you end up with them having an advantage.

    I mean this is an effect of giving money only to research that has curing these illnesses as goal. If you do the groundwork, you don't get any money, so you have to do some of the higher level stuff too, which perhaps others would do if grants were fairly distributed. You can debate whether this is good or bad, both sides have their points.

  2. Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases? by durrr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Parkinsons and alzheimers are neurodegenerative diseases, it takes time for the degeneration to happen.

    It's like replacing a rust eaten component with a new shiny steel one. Yes it will also rust eventually but it will keep things working until then.

  3. Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases? by rmdingler · · Score: 2

    I'm unclear as to why the new cells wouldn't be subject to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Wouldn't they just get the same diseases as the existing cells? Same genetics and environment should lead to the same result.

    Both diseases often overcome a patient later in life, leading us to believe the degenerative effects might be forestalled further by the introduction of healthy young nerve cells.

    It seems like this would be more helpful for trauma treatments where the neurological damage was caused by an event that will not be repeated.

    It is helpful for the study of all human neurological problems, as human neural cells are difficult to acquire for research purposes. FTA: most research is done with a line of rat neural cells.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  4. Re:Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think this is a pretty huge problem. People want to skip all the necessary intermediate steps (like ensuring you are measuring the correct thing) and jump right to the cure. There are tons of examples where some assay is used over and over but no one has ever really fully characterized what is going on. Like this:

    For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

    The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

    He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

    Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using-- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

    I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.

    http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html

  5. Re: Wouldn't the new cells have the same diseases? by toppavak · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.