Possible Cure For MS Turns Common Skin Cells Into Working Brain Cells 87
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have discovered a way to convert ordinary skin cells into myelinating cells, or brain cells that have been destroyed in patients with multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and other myelin disorders. The research, published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, may now enable 'on demand' production of myelinating cells, which insulate and protect neurons to facilitate the delivery of brain impulses to the rest of the body."
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Q: How did Microsoft break Volkswagen's world record?
A: Volkswagen only made 22 million bugs!
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Here's a first pass:
What do you get when you cure brain disease?
No more windows 8.
Here's one! (Score:1)
Possible Cure For MS Turns Common Skin Cells Into Working Brain Cells
Apparently the researchers discovered that people who use MS products only have skin cells in their skulls.
10 LET M$ = "Microsoft" (Score:2)
Some people claim that "M$" is childish. But stories like this are why I still use the abbreviation to fit under the 50-character limit of comment subjects. M$ unambiguously means Microsoft, recalling its beginning as a publisher of line-numbered BASIC interpreters for 8- and 16-bit microcomputers where string variable names ended with $.
On the one hand, the similarity of the names is a joke [jokebuddha.com]. On the other hand, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society did call Microsoft corporation of the year in 1999 [microsoft.com].
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Maybe I'm tired, or just having a slow day. The joke nearly went "whoosh" for me. Good one though!
The residents of Silicon Valley are more confused than usual after a billboard campaign by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society of America used this line in an ad slogan "MS, it's not a software company"... exploiting the fame of a certain company to draw attention to an altogether worthier cause.
Requests to comment on the campaign have been met by a surly silence by Microsoft, which doesn't relish the ass
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I was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis one year after I dumped Windows XP for Linux. Coincidence, or punishment?
I am also allowed to make New Jersey jokes because I was born there.
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"MS" is also Missisippi, it is the stock symbol for Morgan Stanley, it means Master of Science, and there is quite a few other things it can mean which can be put in the same sentence as Microsoft. So I agree the diatribe against "M$" is stupid, it is a useful abbreviation. I also notice that if somebody says something insulting like "Microsuck" nobody comments, but if somebody says "M$" suddenly out of the woodwork comes all the "oh you are childish! Childish! Childish!" responses. I think it shows despera
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Maybe someone should piss on the faces of the people who designed windows 8?
I... I tried.
So the next quesiton is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Now that you've made myelin, how do you get it to stick to actual damaged neurons and/or brian cells. If you inject it in there, is it naturally just going to bind to damaged cells?
Yeah, exactly. Otherwise I don't think clumps of myelin just floating around the brain are going to be a good thing.
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It's always amazing how much of biology is self-assembling. to me, the question is, how do you keep whatever started the disease in the first place from continuing to destroy the new cells?
Re:So the next quesiton is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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We studied the ability of 8TF-induced MEFs to myelinate axons of hypomyelinated shiverer (Mbpshi/shi) mice, which completely lack MBP and compact myelin and serve as a model of congenital dysmyelinating disorders...ultrastructural analysis by electron microscopy showed that the cells generated multilayered compact myelin sheaths around hypomyelinated shiverer host axons in slice culture
If you're wondering, here is a link video showing why they're called "shiverer." Be forewarned, it's a little disturbing to watch them. I say that having done mouse brain research myself. The reeler mice I've seen in person (Er, seen in mouse) are actually kind of cute, they stagger around like they're drunk (not the best video, but here [youtube.com]. These shivering mice on the oth
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Searching for "shiver" I didn't see anything about a reduction in shivers in the treated mice. That would have been pretty huge had it rescued the "symptoms" of the condition, so I'm going to assume that at this first pass it was
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Thanks for the link. A long time ago, I worked in a lab which did a much less sophisticated version of this experiment. They took oligodendrocyte precursor cells (a cell line called 02A), which were genetically engineered to express some kind of easily-seen marker protein (forget which one). The cells were isolated and cultured (which was a pain in the ass to do) from a special breed of non-shiverer mice with the marker protein. Then they were injected into the dorsal columns of shiverer mice, much like
So now the hungry Zombies will cry: (Score:2, Funny)
"Skkiiiinnnnnnn...."
Exobrain (Score:1)
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Circumcisions will become extinct.
They'd become the modern equivalent of lobotomy? Well, a part of the population wouldn't notice the difference anyway.
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You say this like it isn't happening already...
Cautiously Optimistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cautiously Optimistic (Score:5, Funny)
The damage done in MS is to the nervous system, and all that new myelin could do would be to prevent further damage. That's still very much worth pursuing if it allows a healing process to take place - whether natural or another man-made therapy.
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Untrue. The symptoms of MS are due to demyelination. Current treatments reduce the inflammatory response and therefore further myelin destruction but do nothing to rebuild the destroyed myelin. Remyelinating the neurons is the missing step in MS treatment.
Re:Cautiously Optimistic (Score:4, Informative)
It's easiest to think of MS as mice chewing the insulation off the wiring in your car resulting in short circuits and lost signals. Curing the disease would be getting rid of the mice. This treatment is like taking your car to the shop to have the wiring replaced, but the car is still full of mice that will eat the wiring again. The current treatments for MS just put the mice (mostly) to sleep, but they're still there and could awake at any time and some people's mice are more resistant than others.
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This is part of the solution.
I have some friends with MS, and even this partial patch job would be a vast improvement, even if it has to be repeated occasionally.
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Serious question: Does the body repair the wiring (myelin sheath) at ALL by itself?
Is this just eating the insulation faster than it can regrow, or does it not regrow at all?
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Not sure why you're modded funny. You are probably correct, in that this therapy wouldn't reverse the effects, at least not immediately. Whether the body can heal on its own (albeit slowly), or there needs to be some other complementary procedure that would actively reverse the effects of MS is probably an area that warrants further study.
Mods? Are you playing mod-roulette today?
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A bit of both, at least if it works -
For neurones lacking mylin slows signals and increases the capacity for crosstalk among other things, in addition to these problems this can cause connections to be lost eventually leading controlled cell suicide (apoptosis).
The reduced efficiency will be repaired allowing the neurons left to talk properly again, at least if it works - this should cause some recovery, potentially quite a bit.
Dead neurons do get replaced but only at a very slow rate, so any neuronal die-o
Re:Cautiously Optimistic (Score:4, Informative)
It's not going to prevent further damage. This certainly isn't a cure or potential cure for MS, but if it works well it might help fix some of the damage that's been done. Some. Axons die in MS, and this won't replace them. There's good evidence that a lot of the actual damage is due to neuronal damage and not a failure to remyelinate.
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Not necessarily. There has been quite a bit of work on transplanting oligodendrocytes and their precursor cells, including stem cells. That hasn't yielded any real results. Other research has shown that there really isn't a shortage of oligo precursor cells. There are some axons that don't remyelinate but a big source of damage seems to be axons that are permanently damaged or die when they're demyelinated.
It's interesting and might be useful, but it might equally well turn out not to be useful in MS at
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This research has potential to become a treatment to repair the lesions in the brain caused by MS.
From the second linked article:
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One, is a way to stop the destruction of the myelin. We don't really have that, but we do have stuff that slows it down.
Two, is a means to repair the damage the disease/disorder did. That's what this treatment may do.
It's not the ultimate solution, but it looks like it's a big step in the right direction.
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Short version, differe
And I wonder (Score:3)
And since I have a slight risk this is good news.
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FYI - ALS is primarily a neurodegenerative disease where the neurons themselves are dying off and not a demyelinating disease where the neurons remain intact but loose their myelin sheath.
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I am wondering if the federal ban on funding for embryonic stem cells played a role in funding this particular research or even made the scientists redirect their efforts??? Sometimes a seemingly stupid policy has unexpected positive results. We in the US might actually dodge a research black hole by not getting to invested in embryonic stems cells which have many problems the persons on bodies don't.
Not a whole lot. Converting already differentiated cells (like skin cells) into other cell types or pleuripotent stem cells has always been a hot research topic. Even without the federal funding ban, working on embryonic cells is a PITA. Skin fibroblasts are much easier to deal with. Also, the understanding of how to de-differentiate cells is obviously an important part of understanding developmental biology. If you can run the tape both forwards and backwards you have a better chance of understanding
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In short, they just aren't as good as the real thing. Of course, they are still working to improve the induced vers
Nature Article discussion (Score:4, Informative)
Just a quick walk-through of the first section of the paper:
Cell-based therapies for myelin disorders, such as multiple sclerosis and leukodystrophies, require technologies to generate functional oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. Here we describe direct conversion of mouse embryonic and lung fibroblasts to induced oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (iOPCs) using sets of either eight or three defined transcription factors.
The Slashdot summary and 3rd party source says "skin cells", but the paper indicates the specific cell type used were "mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs)"; specifically, they were MEFs isolated from a transgenic mouse lineage where a specific transactivator had already been engineered into their genome. This transactivator was designed to work together with the introduced Lentivirus vector (a retrovirus, member of the genus to which HIV belongs), carrying the Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Cell (OPC) transcription factors.
In a later section of the paper, they perform a similar process with "mouse lung fibroblasts" (MLFs), and also test several different combinations of transcription factors.
iOPCs exhibit a bipolar morphology and global gene expression profile consistent with bona fide OPCs. They can be expanded in vitro for at least five passages while retaining the ability to differentiate into multiprocessed oligodendrocytes.
Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Can be expanded into a flock while still retaining duck-ness.
When transplanted to hypomyelinated mice, iOPCs are capable of ensheathing host axons and generating compact myelin. Lineage conversion of somatic cells to expandable iOPCs provides a strategy to study the molecular control of oligodendrocyte lineage identity and may facilitate neurological disease modeling and autologous remyelinating therapies.
Induced OPC cells integrate into their normal niche, insulating neurons (at least at the cellular level). Didn't see much discussion of whether or not it altered the hypomyelinated ("shiver" mouse) phenotype.
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The Slashdot summary and 3rd party source says "skin cells", but the paper indicates the specific cell type used were "mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs)"
Well, fibroblasts are common in the skin, and you can easily get fibroblasts from taking a small patch of skin. You're right that they're not the keratinized cells that make up most of the skin, but they are in the skin.
Induced OPC cells integrate into their normal niche, insulating neurons (at least at the cellular level). Didn't see much discussion of whether or not it altered the hypomyelinated ("shiver" mouse) phenotype.
It did restore at least some myelination [nature.com] but not all of the axons, and I didn't see anything about it improving the shivers.
Multiple Sclerosis (Score:1)
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What happens if the body reacts and tries to compensate? By turning brain into skin, for example?
A skinhead?
Say NO to Circumcision (Score:1)
Now we have proof. A guys brain sits at the end of his cock.