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Promising results in stem cell research Study yields helpful disease treatments Monday, March 12, 2007 BY KITTA MacPHERSON Star-Ledger Staff Scientists have come up with what could someday be one of the first workable treatments using embryonic stem cells to thwart a disease. "Everybody is always saying to us, 'Well, you guys studying the human embryonic stem cells, you haven't benefited anyone yet,'" said Evan Snyder, a neuroscientist who has published breakthrough papers on both embryonic and adult stem cells. "Well, this is it." The international team, headed by Snyder, a physician-scientist at the Burnham Institute in California, also compared the effectiveness of embryonic stem cells versus the "adult" variety and found them to be equally effective. The data is so strong, Snyder said, he plans to call upon the federal Food and Drug Administration to allow him to launch clinical trials immediately to test the effectiveness of the treatment against Tay-Sachs disease, a genetic disorder affecting Ashkenazi Jews. The research was posted online yesterday on the Web site of the journal Nature Medicine. Snyder, along with colleagues at Burnham and the University of Oxford in England, studied mice with a mutation that impedes the normal processing of fatty proteins for brain development. The mice develop Sandhoff disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disorder closely related to Tay-Sachs disease and part of a larger class of brain diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and autism. In the experiment, the scientists started by injecting mouse neural stem cells into the brains of newborn Sandhoff mice. They found the new cells replaced brain tissue damaged by the disease and did even more, repairing nerve cells and even transmitting nerve impulses. This was evidence, the scientists said, stem cells may integrate electrically and functionally into a diseased brain. "It shows that stem cells are not merely replacement parts -- it's not like swapping out spark plugs," Snyder said. "There's a whole complex network of cross-talk and that's how they exert their effects." For the next step, the scientists conducted a set of parallel experiments, injecting Sandhoff mice in one group with embryonic stem cells and the other with "adult" cells that had been isolated from human fetal brain cells. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn