Primed Stem Cells Become Mature Neurons

The study was published November 11, 2002, in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

A major obstacle confronting researchers attempting to use stem cells to treat neurologic disorders is that the majority of such cells do not differentiate into neurons when grafted into non-neurogenic areas of the adult central nervous system. Most cells simply fail to develop or become glial support cells, not the neurons that need to be replaced.

In the current study, researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch (Galveston, USA; www.utmb.edu) pre-treated human fetal stem cells with a mixture of chemicals important to neuron development. When injected into the prefrontal cortex, medial septum and spinal cord of adult rats, the "primed” cells almost all differentiated into neurons. Furthermore, they developed into the proper type of neurons for the area of the central nervous system into which they had been implanted.

"This priming seems to get the cells into a plastic intermediate stage, and then after they are injected they acquire environmental cues and become specific kinds of neurons according to where they are located,” explained first author Dr. Ping Wu, an assistant professor of anatomy and neurosciences at the University of Texas Medical Branch. "Until now, nobody has been able to get a significant number of cholinergic neurons from primarily cultured stem cells, but using this primer we can get over 55% such neurons with transplanted stem cells.”




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University of Texas Medical Branch