Word: cured
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Meanwhile, genetically engineered drugs will increasingly replace the scalpel for removal of tumors or cosmetic surgery like hair transplants. Indeed, after much hype and few results, gene therapy is finally making major strides--although not the way doctors thought it would. Once they hoped to cure diseases by repairing defective genes. Now it seems a lot easier to determine what proteins the broken genes should be making and replace them instead. Dr. Jeffrey Isner at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston has achieved remarkable results with a protein called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF2) in restoring circulation...
...Decade of the Brain proclaimed by President George Bush draws to a close, neuroscientists are increasingly sanguine that in George Jr.'s lifetime, brain-cell transplants may reverse, if not cure, a host of neurological diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, as well as brain damage caused by strokes and head injuries. Even a year ago, such a sweeping claim might have been dismissed as nonsense. But that was before last fall's discovery that the fetal human brain contains master cells (called neural stem cells) that can grow into any kind of brain cell. Snyder extracted these...
...transformed themselves into healthy neurons. "That's the beauty of stem cells," says Snyder. "You don't have to find the injury--the stem cells do it for you. They instinctively home in on the damage even from great distances." In another experiment, Snyder used stem cells to cure mice of a disease that resembled multiple sclerosis. And in his latest, unpublished work, Snyder introduced massive brain injuries in mice--including strokes to the cortex--and cured them with stem cells...
...head, so to speak. As has the latest finding, announced last month by researchers at Princeton, that adult macaque monkeys are constantly growing new cells in the highest and most complex area of the brain, the cerebral cortex. Snyder is now flush with confidence that neuroscience will ultimately cure many, if not all, diseases of the human brain. "By the year 2020 I hope we will have an active way of treating damaged brains. If we can further understand brain-cell regeneration and harness the process intelligently, then re-creating the brain, or at least parts of the brain...
Elsewhere, researchers are looking at ways to hasten the healing permitted by these antibodies. Peripheral nerves outside the cord heal themselves all the time, thanks to regenerative bodies called Schwann cells. Scientists at the Salk Institute in San Diego and at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami are experimenting with harvesting Schwann cells and transplanting them to the site of a spinal injury, where they can serve as a bridge across the wound...