For years stem cells have been be thought of to be the medical breakthrough that will change medicine forever. However, so far there has only been limited success in the field. But Professor Peter Gunning from Australia’s University for NSW has successfully reproduced muscle tissues, making this one of the biggest medical break through in modern times. The hope is that this will be used to regrow muscles that have died in such diseases as muscular dystrophy.
Lead author on the subject is Professor Peter Gunning, head of the Oncology Research Unit at the University of NSW, had said before now, that the new healthy cells had no survival advantage over the dominant existing damage tissue. In addition, the injected donor cells were almost immediately wiped out by the immune system.
"In muscle, most stem cells die in the first hour or are present in such low numbers that they are not much help," Professor Gunning said.
In an interview with ABC local radio Professor Gunning described the difficulties they faced to achieve this “When you introduce stem cells they tend to get out-competed by the locals and they tend to disappear quite quickly. So what we decided to do was take a strategy where we got rid of the locals who would normally compete with the incoming stem cells and also give the incoming stem cells a selective advantage; and we did that using chemotherapy." Using chemotherapy, Professor Gunning found that you could kill off the cells in a diseased muscle and at the same time introduce a chemo-resistant muscle stem cell that would create a new and healthy muscle.
This breakthrough was achieved by using a mouse engineered to have an injured skeletal muscle. However, this concept could be applied to human related illness and diseases such as lung disorders, chronic liver disease and type 1 and 2 diabetes.
This experiment is being funded by the Oncology Children Foundation and is still in the clinical trial phase. It is Professor Gunning’s hope that Human trials will take place in 3-5 years time.
Original Article:http://www.ecancermedicalscience.com/news-insider-news.asp?itemId=443
Transcription of Radio Interview:
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s2507821.htm
By Lachlan Mclean
