Stem Cells Cure Paralyzed Rats

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article on Forbes as well as other sources, 'Scientists have used [embryonic] stem cells and a soup of nerve-friendly chemicals to not just bridge a damaged spinal cord but actually regrow the circuitry needed to move a muscle, helping partially paralyzed rats walk.'"

Rather old news!

[masikh]

This article (well maybe not this article, but same research) was posted on slashdot about a year ago. Thus is this research a nice copycat or just a person who hasn't done it's homework? Still nice development.

Re:Embryonic?

[aardwolf64]

There is nothing illegal about using embryonic RAT stem cells...

Re:If only...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a genetics research laboratory, and I'm not allowed to keep mice, rats, guinepigs, or hampsters as a pet at home

If the lab you work in is part of Jackson Labs, that's a reasonably paranoid restriction. If a university lab has an infection problem, they're often small enough to treat the issue medically. If not, they can buy a fresh population from, say, Jackson Labs. Jackson needs to have the equivalent of "five-nines" reliability in their animals, where a univeristy vivarium is usually happy with two or thee nines.

Re:This is what we're talking about

[ElleyKitten]

There's a lot of Christians who don't believe that embryos are people. You can't just look religious affiliation stats and say that all of these people believe this, because they don't.

Also, we're not talking late-term fetuses that look like babies. We're not talking about fetuses like the ones you see on ultrasounds. We're talking about microscopic eggs that have been fertilized for a few days. If they were in a woman, she wouldn't know. If they failed to implant or miscarried, she'd never notice. However, they're not in a woman. Most embryos for stem cell research come from fertility clinics, extras created for backup and then unneeded, so they will never go in a woman and grow into a baby. If they weren't donated to science, they'd be thrown away. I for one, would rather they be used to help people, or even animals, rather than be thrown away.

Re:This is what we're talking about

[plunge]

I guess you better leave America then, unless you agree with every single bill passed, ever, including the ones that contradict each other.

And, in addition, not all Christian churches believe as a matter of doctrine that zygotes are little tiny people screaming out for protection with their cytoplasm mouths.

Re:This is amazing

[MillionthMonkey]

Oh wait, the president only said that federal funding wouldn't be available, he didn't actually ban anything (except human cloning), now did he? In fact, there aren't really a 'raft of restrictions' at all, just a short list of stem cell lines for which federal funding is available, and not for any others.

Oh wait, you have no idea how science gets funded in this country, and are parroting a talking point that someone prepared for your consumption. Most scientific research depends on federal funding. The stem cell lines on the "short list" are useless because there are so few of them and they are now contaminated with the cells from other animals that are used to keep the stem cells alive. The Bush ban isn't a matter of the government paying for all your lab costs except for particular stem cell lines which get crossed off as a line item. If any lab in any scientific research organization touches a non-Bush-approved stem cell line, it "poisons" the entire organization "GPL-style" and all federal funding gets cut off for all research that the organization might be doing whether it is related to stem cells at all or not. That will effectively shut it down.

If this is the universal panacea that it's being touted to be, then there should be no difficulty finding state, local, or private funding sources. You just can't feed out of the FEDERAL money-trough on this one.

The voters of the state of California approved Prop 71 which set up a bond for a stem-cell research in the state as a result of the federal funding restriction. The state would be getting a new non-federal research facility that would not be tainted by a single dollar of federal funding for equipment or office supplies or anything. Unfortunately, construction on the facility has now been held up for years now because of lawsuits from litigious wingnuts.

Re:Question

[poot_rootbeer]

Who paralyzes the rats in the first place? Do the scientists step on 'em?

Not the scientists, no. That what lab assistants are for! I wish I was joking.

Actually, they probably design some sort of rat-spine-breaking device so the assistants can paralyze them more uniformly than could be achieved just by stepping on them. I wish I was joking about that too.

Re:If this goes commercial...

[gstoddart]

...would viagra go out of business...?

Of course not, and asking means you understand neither how an erection (and Viagara) work nor how spinal cord injuries work.

Viagara is a Vasoconstrictor [wikipedia.org] which causes blood vessels to contract. It was developed for other clinical applications, and had the happy side effect of granting erections to people. Except for a few people, it's probably not used very much for its original purpose.

Using stem cells to re-connect severed nerves means that the conduit to transmit nerve impulses had been severed. Think spinal cord injuries. This technique allowed them to re-connect themselves and return mobility.

For the record, a quadraplegic can probably get an erection (give or take some injury-specific considerations) -- they may not be able to feel it, but they can have one. A spinal cord injury doesn't cause impotence, it causes loss of voluntary muscular control. The blood still flows, and many of the other muscles involved are involuntary anwyay.

So, NO, stemm cells to repair spinal cords will probably not affect the sales of Viagara. (Unless people who can suddenly walk again decide they also want to buy viagara.) Completely different body systems are affected by the two.

Cheers