More good news. There seems to be progress weekly!
Scientists Cure Mice Of Sickle Cell Using Stem Cell Technique – washingtonpost.com
Using a recently developed technique for turning skin cells into stem cells, scientists have cured mice of sickle cell anemia — the first direct proof that the easily obtained cells can reverse an inherited, potentially fatal disease.
Researchers said the work, published in yesterday’s online edition of the journal Science, points to a promising future for the novel cells. Known as iPS cells, they have been touted by President Bush and some scientists as a possible substitute for embryonic stem cells, which have been mired for years in political controversy.
But researchers also cautioned that aspects of the new approach will have to be changed before it can be tried in human patients. Most important, the technique depends on the use of gene-altered viruses that have the potential to trigger tumor growth.
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“Induced pluripotent stem,” or iPS, cells, are virtually identical to embryonic stem cells. They can morph into all of the more than 200 cell types in the body but are derived from skin, not from embryos. Mouse iPS cells were first derived earlier this year, and scientists reported last month to great fanfare that they had created similar cells from human skin.
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… now the blood cells being produced were free of the sickle cell mutation.
“All the parameters we can measure are now normal,” Jaenisch said. “The mice are cured.”
People with sickle cell disease can be cured with bone marrow transplants, but only about 20 percent of patients have a healthy sibling whose tissue type is a close enough match to avoid immunological complications, Townes said. Even in those cases, about 20 percent of the transplants fail, and sometimes they result in a potentially deadly reaction called graft-vs.-host disease.
Those problems do not arise with iPS cell transplants because the cells are genetically identical to the animals getting them.
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