Schwann Cell Precursors from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells as a Potential Therapeutic
 

This is the most promising thing I have read on PN lately


Schwann Cell Precursors from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells as a Potential Therapeutic Target for Myelin Repair

I have to admit, much of the article was over my head. I am learning new terms everyday, today it was 'demyelination disorder':

"A demyelinating disease is any disease of the nervous system in which the myelin sheath of neurons is damaged. This damage impairs the conduction of signals in the affected nerves."

I get the jist that stem derived Schwann cells can repair the myelin and I agree, very promising. What I lose in the verbage is what happened to our own schwann cells and why are they not making repairs on their own?

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".

Kiwi.....Thanks for translating.....they should have hired you to do the summary;)