Neuroscientists will soon be able to grow human brain cells in petri dishes.
“It’s like an assembly line,” says Bjorn Scheffler, at the University of Florida. “We can basically take these cells and freeze them until we need them. Then we thaw them, begin a cell-generating process, and produce a tonne of new neurons.”
Scheffler collected stem cells from mice and doused them with chemicals to make them grow into different types of cell in the body, a process called differentiation. During the process, his team took pictures of the cells every few minutes.
The scientists confirmed that development of stem cells in the brain is similar to the way in which blood cells are produced from stem cells in bone marrow, which led to insights for bone marrow transplants. The new technique holds the promise of producing a supply of a person’s cells that may be able to treat disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy and could lead to the development of new drugs to encourage damaged nerves to re-grow.
Via The Guardian. UF News.
Another team of scientists, at Duke University, have been able to make long-lasting blood vessels from human cells.
They have solved short life-span of the cells by infecting the donor cells with a harmless virus carrying an enzyme to encourage longevity.
All human cells have “inbuilt timers” called telomeres, which shorten every time a cell divides. Cells from older people have shorter telomeres and therefore can multiply far less than cells from younger people.
The scientists took samples of discarded vein from elderly men and treated the cells with a virus carrying the enzyme human telomerase reverse-transcriptase (hTERT). By blocking the telomere timers, hTERT helped the cells to keep on multiplying.
The researchers say the findings could help heart patients who need artery grafts. However, there is still some work to be done before engineered blood vessels can be used to treat patients.