Investigators at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have demonstrated in mice a way that might reduce the time it takes for a bone marrow transplant to rebuild a child’s immune system, and so reduce the risk of potentially fatal virus infections that can occur during this time.
Scientists from Johns Hopkins and from the University of Milan have effectively proven that they can inhibit lethal human brain cancers in mice using a protein that selectively induces positive changes in the activity of cells that behave like cancer stem cells. The report is published this week in Nature.
The results of the first large-scale empirical study of how consumers consider risks and benefits when deciding whether to purchase or use specific nanotechnology products will appear in the December 2006 issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The article’s lead author, Steven C. Currall and co-author, Neal Lane, will report their findings at a program at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 5, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Transplanted neural stem cells hold promise for reducing the destruction of dopaminergic cells that occurs in Parkinson’s disease and for replacing cells lost to the disease, scientists say.
A sugar molecule present on embryonic stem cells also has been found on the surface of a type of adult stem cell, a discovery that may help researchers isolate and purify adult stem cells for use in therapies aimed at bone healing, tendon repair and cartilage regeneration, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center report.
Scientists have discovered an unsuspected role for a gene known to be one of the best predictors of human breast cancer outcome.
Drugs used to destroy cancer cells may actually be more harmful to healthy cells in the brain, research suggests, done by a team from New York’s University of Rochester. They found several types of key brain cell were highly vulnerable to the drugs.
In handling fraudulent stem-cell research articles, journal editors went above and beyond existing procedures to try and verify the findings, but in today’s competitive publishing environment, more stringent, less trusting safeguards are now essential, an independent committee has concluded.
Skeletal progenitor cells differentiate into cartilage cells when one master gene actually suppresses the action of another. Skeletons are made of bone and cartilage cells that are differentiated from the same multipotent stem cell, which gives rise to bone, cartilage, fat and fibroblasts.
Hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) recipients face a significant long-term risk for developing a second cancer, particularly if they were older at the time of transplant or received stem cells from a female donor, according to a new study.