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Grand Magnate
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Join Date: Jan 2015
Location: Sydney, Australia.
Posts: 3,093
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Grand Magnate
Join Date: Jan 2015
Location: Sydney, Australia.
Posts: 3,093
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The "alphabet soup" that cell biologists tend to use makes papers like this hard to follow.
Essentially what they did was make human Swann cells starting with pluripotent human stem cells (human cells which can differentiate into all of the different kinds of human cells).
They then put the human Swann cells into mice which had experimental nerve damage and found that this enhanced nerve repair. They argued but did not prove that this was because the human Swann cells produced factors which are important in nerve repair.
If this approach were to be used to treat humans there are some potential immunological problems which will need to be solved. Swann cells made by the method of this paper will not be the same as those of the recipient in an immunological sense.
In other forms of transplant medicine it is important that the transplanted organ is immunologically as similar as possible to its recipient - this is called "tissue-matching".
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