Word: gehrig
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...newly created cells made insulin in diabetic mice, though they were not cured. But if the experiment's approach proves viable, it might lead to treatments like growing new heart cells after a heart attack or nerve cells to treat disorders like ALS, formerly Lou Gehrig's disease...
...Kevin Eggan at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Christopher Henderson at Columbia University, the 13-person team reported online today in Science Express that they had generated motor neurons from the skin cells of two elderly patients with a rare form of ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, a progressive neurodegenerative condition. The new study marks an important first step on the road toward real stem-cell-based therapies, and also answers several plaguing questions about the pioneering stem-cell technique known as induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPS, generation...
...have in the culture dish cells which have the same genetic makeup as do the ALS patients, and they are the very cells that are affected by the disease." said Columbia professor Christopher Henderson, referring to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative often called Lou Gehrig's Disease. "This provides us with the opportunity...to study these motor neurons derived from the ALS cells...
Though the researchers expressed optimism about their ability to use the reprogrammed stem cells to study the progression of Lou Gehrig's disease and test potential treatments, a number of hurdles remain to discovering such therapies...
...only a certain type of the disease, which afflicts less than five percent of sufferers, Eggan said. But the study authors said research on this less-common variant could have broader applications, if, as they hope, the disease mechanism is similar for most or all types of Lou Gehrig's disease despite different initial triggers in the vast majority of ALS patients...