A Paralyzed Animal Healed

StemCellsChina.com

Mittwoch, 21. Juni 2006 um 03:16 Uhr

There are no translations available.

Source: ABCNews

The pictures, when you see them, are striking: first you watch a white lab rat, clearly struggling. We're told it's been paralyzed in the rear legs by a Sindbus virus--one that, in rats, targets and kills the nerve cells that regulate motor control.

The next video, we're told, was shot four months later. In it, the rat is walking again. It's been cured--but more than that, the neurons that were destroyed by the virus were replaced by new, healthy ones.

It sounds audacious--the notion that the lame shall walk again--but it's real research, reported by a team at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and published in next Monday's issue of Annals of Neurology. And it's a first: the team used stem cells, apparently for the first time ever in animals, to create new "motor neurons."

You can see the Johns Hopkins video HERE :

"This is the first time that we've actually been able to talk about replacing a motor neuron that tells a muscle to move in the spinal cord of an adult animal," said Naomi Kleitman, who's been working on stem cells at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of NIH. "This is important in spinal cord injury, in diseases like ALS, polio would be an example. where the actual connection to the muscle was lost and now we have a possibility that that might be replaced again."

Mouse_embryonic_stem_cells

The research at Johns Hopkins was led by Dr. David Kerr. "I think that even two, three years ago, the possibility of this was more in the realm of science fiction," he said when we interviewed him.

(You can see more comments by Kerr and Kleitman by clicking HERE .)
A few important caveats, though:

--As we're forced to say in all too many medical-research stories, don't go running to your doctor. This was only an animal study; it may be a long time, if ever, before people can benefit from this research.

--This is a piece of research that reopens the long debate over the ethics of stem cell research. Mouse embryos were created, and destroyed, in the course of this experiment, and this is exactly the kind of experiment that worries people who are concerned about the prospect of destroying human embryos.

We gave a call to David Prentice, now with the Family Research Council in Washington. He takes the position that embryonic stem cells may be unnecessary, that cells taken from bone marrow or the umbilical cords of newborns may be just as useful. "There's a lot of science yet to be done to say whether embryonic will ever be any good to treat a patient," he told us.

The Hopkins team performed its experiment on 15 rats. It reports that eleven of them regained significant use of their paralyzed legs. Where might this lead?

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