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Scientists have announced they've found a way to coax adult hair follicle stem cells into becoming brain cells. As this ScienCentral News video report explains, the research means these potentially precious cells may be everywhere there's hair.
Stem cells are different from other cells because they can change into specialized cells the body needs, the body maintain and repair itself. Many scientists are working to grow tissue from adult stem cells in order to avoid the ethical and legal controversies surrounding embryonic stem cells. In hair follicles, stem cells are found in a small bulge on the side of the hair follicle. They used to help the follicle maintain itself.
"By luck," is how AntiCancer President Robert Hoffman describes finding the link between hair follicle stem cells and the brain. He shows off a hairless mouse that's at the center of the research. Under special light it glows bright green, like a child's toy.
Glowing mouse
"What we wanted to do was image the stem cells in the brain," Hoffman explains. To do that they used a gene that makes jellyfish glow under fluorescent light. By linking the gene to a protein called "nestin" which is a protein in brain cells. Hoffman says the then put the mouse into an imager, "hoping to see the brain." Instead, he says, "all we could see was the green fluorescence of the skin. So we know that nestin must be expressed in the skin because the green fluorescent protein was expressed and they're linked. When they saw that the hair follicles were glowing brightly Hoffman says, "we knew at that point that there was a relationship between the stem cells of the hair follicle and the stem cells of the brain."
The next steps would be to better understand and isolate the hair follicle stem cells, and then move on to the tricky part of trying to actually grow these stem cells in the lab. "We put them in culture," says Hoffman, "and under conditions where brain stem cells would form neurons, the hair follicle stem cells also formed neurons. We also injected some of these stem cells into the skin of mice and they formed neurons there, too."
Hoffman says there are important implications to his company's discovery. He says, "If this turns out to be easy to do and we can make lots of stem cells and grow them and have a large amount of them and they readily form neurons in vivo, then there are therapeutic implications that possible these hair follicle stem cells can be used for therapeutic purposes, perhaps replacing some types of neurons in the brain or helping nerves heal and other such regenerative medicine as it's called."
Glowing proteins show stem cells have formed neurons. image: AntiCancer, Inc.
Other scientists elsewhere are also learning to coax other adult stem cells into other kinds of tissue, providing an alternative to the controversy surrounding the use of stem cells from embryos. Researchers in Oslo, writing in an earlier issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, report nudging bone marrow stem cells into producing neurons. Alan-Mackay-Sim of Australia's Griffith University reported he's been able to grow adult stem cells from stem cells found in the nose and researchers from Johns Hopkins University are beginning a clinical trial of stem cells to repair muscle tissue damaged by a heart attack.
Hoffman isn't ready to list any diseases or conditions his company's discovery might be used for but is hoping, "That we can perhaps cure many types of neurological diseases with these stem cells."
Hoffman says the hair follicle stem cells also, "can probably form other cell types in the animal as well. He says the next step, "is to further understand the conditions that allow the hair follicle stem cells to form other cells. We want to know how to coax these hair follicle stem cells to make the kind of cells we want them to."
The research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science Online Early Edition the week of March 28 – April 1, 2005 and was Funded by AntiCancer Inc.
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