1/27/2024 0 Comments Neuronyx malvernThough scientists are years from bringing stem cells into mainstream medicine, how fast they reach this goal could depend as much on politics as on breakthroughs in the lab. Either way, as Human Genome Sciences CEO William Haseltine says, stem cells seem to "remind the body it knows how to heal itself." Harvard neurobiologist Evan Snyder calls them "magic seeds." They react to neural damage either by changing into and replacing neurons that have died, becoming a seamless part of the brain's conversation with itself, or by issuing molecular instructions, reteaching the brain the language of rejuvenation. They can react to heart-attack damage by forming both blood vessels and cardiac muscle. When transplanted, they appear to respond to molecular cries for help. They speak the cellular language fluently, juggling many molecular messages at once, as they do when building the body. Stem cells are not only entire cells they are the exquisitely sensitive cells of early development. But the pharmaceuticals industry deals in one molecule, one pinball, at a time-enough, say, to pop open clogged blood vessels, staving off heart attacks for a while, but not enough to block all the converging molecular pathologies involved in heart attacks, let alone in cancer or age-related disorders. Most intractable diseases involve the breakdown of many molecular conversations at once. Mature cells communicate by flipping thousands of tiny molecules at one another like organic pinballs, each molecule a different word in the cellular language. Stem cells may offer a multifaceted approach to problems that today's drugs, narrowly targeted as they can be, can't touch. (NeuralStem's cells, for example, can turn into neurons and the two other kinds of mature brain cells.) Only pockets of stem cells remain after birth, which is why many of our organs can't rejuvenate after serious disease or injury-they're largely made of mature, nonreplicating cells. It develops soon after fertilization and then differentiates into about 210 types of tissue-specific fetal stem cells, which turn into the mature cells that make up all of the body's tissues and organs. The reason for his optimism: The replicating embryonic stem cell is the most potent cell in existence. There is almost no realm of medicine that might not be touched." At the time, Harold Varmus, then director of the National Institutes of Health, told Congress, "This research has the potential to revolutionize the practice of medicine and improve the quality and length of life. Scientists have been talking about such a shift-away from conventional drugs toward what is called regenerative medicine-since the human embryonic stem cell was discovered in 1998. If Garr and others working in the field are right, the results could utterly change both the way medicine is practiced and the way medicines are produced in the 21st century. The cells are being bred in Garr's lab, as they are at a growing number of biotechs, to replace neurons lost to otherwise incurable brain disorders ranging from Parkinson's disease to Alzheimer's. But the pink water is a bath of amino acids and growth factors, and the "dragonflies" are human nerve cells that have grown from the "eyelashes"-or what Garr, the CEO of NeuralStem Biopharmaceuticals, calls "the world's largest supply of human fetal neural stem cells." The contents of others look like smashed dragonflies. Seen through a microscope, the contents of some petri dishes look like the bottom of a fashion model's sink: discarded eyelashes floating in pink water. White-coated technicians are busily dribbling nutrients from pipettes into petri dishes stored by the hundreds in small refrigerators. (FORTUNE Magazine) – Sweeping his arm as if parting a theater curtain, Richard Garr enters a College Park, Md., lab that's bustling with life-in more ways than one.
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