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Old 03-22-2007, 01:46 PM #1
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Thelma Thelma is offline
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Thelma Thelma is offline
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Default Stem cells become Adult stem cells about a month after birth,,,Wow

Breakthrough may help leukemia victims
Blood stem cells from the livers of two-week-old mouse fetuses used in study
Glenn Bohn, Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, March 22, 2007
VANCOUVER - Researchers at the BC Cancer Agency are reporting a potential breakthrough in stem cell research on laboratory mice that may eventually help cancer specialists develop better treatments for people with leukemia and other cancers of the blood system.
The study used blood stem cells -- cells that can regenerate more blood cells -- from the livers of two-week-old mouse fetuses.
Dr. Connie Eaves and her team at the BC Cancer Agency's Terry Fox laboratory in Vancouver compared those embryonic cells with the blood stem cells of mice after birth.

Doctoral student David Kent conducts stem cell research.
They discovered the blood stem cells in fetal and adult mice are markedly different and switch dramatically to the adult type from the fetal type between three and four weeks after birth.
"Previously, it was not clear exactly how fetal and adult blood stem cells differ, or when the properties of adult stem cells were acquired," states a cancer agency news release issued Thursday. "The finding that they remain unchanged until after birth and then suddenly change -- all at once -- was not expected."
David Kent, a doctoral student and one of the study's authors, says that shift takes place over a "very narrow window" of time, when a mouse is between three and four weeks old. The life span of a mouse is about two years.
"Now that we have this window, we're able to focus in on what causes that switch," Kent said during an interview. "Any time that happens very quickly, you assume that it's at least one molecule, or a small number of molecules, that kind of act as master regulators of many key downstream events."
Kent said it may be years before researchers figure out what controls the switch.
By understanding how the fetal-to-adult switch is triggered, scientists hope to find a way to block the switch or reverse it -- information that could, potentially, help them design treatments to boost healthy bone marrow cells in humans.
Embryonic stem cells are cells that develop into many different cell types in the body. Theoretically, they can divide without limit to replenish other cells, for as long as a person or animal is alive. But adult stem cells can stop working normally, allowing the growth of the cancerous blood cells that cause leukemia.
The ultimate goal, Kent said, is to figure out a way of regulating the uncontrolled growth of adult stem cells that have somehow gone wrong.
Kent said it's possible that chemotherapy may still need to be used to kill off cancerous blood cells, but research may one day allow doctors to take normal adult stem cells out of a leukemia patient, multiply the normal cells and reintroduce them into the patient's body, so the patient can continue to produce normal blood cells for the rest of his or her life.
And when would that day come?
"That's a very difficult thing to predict," Kent replied.
- Embryonic stem cells are cells that have the potential to develop into many cell types in the body, such as blood cells, muscle cells, red blood cells or brain cells. They are a kind of repair system for the body and theoretically, can divide without limit to replenish other cells for as long as a person or animal is alive.
- A stem cell line is a population of cells that is grown out of the body in an incubator.
- Once a stem cell line is established from a cell in the body, it is essentially immortal. A cell line can be grown in the laboratory indefinitely and cells may be frozen for storage or distribution to other researchers.
- Stem cell lines grown in the lab provide scientists with the opportunity to 'engineer' them for use in transplantation or treatment of diseases. Scientists might also be able to replace damaged genes or add new genes to stem cells in order to give them characteristics that can ultimately treat diseases.
Sources: US National Institutes of Health, http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics, and International Society for Stem Cell Research, http://www.isscr.org
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