Hi All,
Stem Cells (BioTech) have suddenly caught the fancy of investment
letters....  I like this "take" on stem cells.....   murray


MSN MoneyCentral Investor - Insight
Strategic News Service - SNS Tech Trends - 6/4/2001
Mark Anderson is president of Technology Alliance Partners,
and of the Strategic News Service.

Reassessing cell determinism
There are moments in the history of each science that offer the real
excitement of revolutions in our understanding, and one of those
moments, at least for me, came a couple of weeks ago.

Having studied biology for most of my adult life, I am familiar with the
now-old paradigm about how cells get to be what they are. It went
something like this: cells increase in their specificity as the fertilized egg
goes through increasing divisions, and this process results, finally, in an
embryo, and then a newborn, with most (if not all) cells achieving their
type: skin, brain, digestive organ, muscle, bone, etc. Once this has
happened, these cells can continue to divide (as, say, muscle cells), but
re-differentiation into other cell types is considered essentially a sport
case, rare if ever seen.

In other words, the body makes its cells, they go into growth and/or self-
replacement mode until their repair mechanisms slow and falter, and then
you die.

The developmental biology community has been alive with excitement
over stem cells for many years now, and everyone is familiar with some
of the major steps in this story: discovering that bone marrow cells
could regenerate blood cells of leukemia victims (smart kids will want to
argue about my categorization of this one), the apparent ability of
embryonic stem cells to develop into a variety of tissues, the discovery
of stem cells in human adipose fat tissue, and now …

Three weeks ago, Yale Cancer Center researcher Diane Krause published
a paper in the journal Cell, together with Neil Theise, of New York
University School of Medicine (both are M.D.s), and with other
collaborators from their own schools, and the Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine.

Here is what they found, using mice: If you irradiate a female mouse
(killing stem cells), and then transplant a single male-derived (therefore
Y-chromosome-marked) adult stem cell from bone marrow, a surprising
thing happens: the male stem cells differentiate into not only bone
marrow and blood cells, but also -- lung, esophagus, stomach, small and
large intestine, liver and skin cells.

Wow.
Lest you think that this has no connection to humans, prior experiments
of the same kind, but more limited scope (looking only at new liver cell
generation from stem cells), were reproducible in humans.

Summary: There appears to be a completely new ecology of cell types at
work in our bodies, whereby we give ourselves our own bone marrow
transplants for the replenishment of other tissues on some kind of as-
needed basis.

There are many uncrossed Ts here, but the basic idea is wonderful, and
totally new.

Now you're excited..

©2001 Strategic News Service LLC; free trial subscriptions to
Strategic News Service are available at http://www.tapsns.com.
Mark Anderson is a principal in the investment advisory firm
Resonance Capital Management LLC. Under no circumstances does
the above information represent a recommendation to buy or sell
stocks.

http://moneycentral.msn.com/articles/invest/trends/6997.asp?0si=-

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