Cells taken from cloned mouse embryos have been used to successfully treat similar conditions in mice to Parkinson's disease in humans
Cells taken from cloned mouse embryos have been used to successfully treat similar conditions in mice to Parkinson's disease in humans. The breakthrough made by American scientists can help in the search for a cure for the common brain disease.
The embryonic stem cells, as reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology, were grown and became tissue that was implanted in the brain of an adult mouse. However, there are still many roadblocks to human treatment, the researchers say.
The team at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center in New York is not the first to clone embryonic cells to treat Parkinson's in mice, but they are the first to use cloned cells.
Although embryonic stem cells - taken from a five-day-old fetus - are all identical, they have the ability, when under the necessary biochemical conditions, to become any type of cell in the body. In theory, they could allow an inexhaustible supply of many types of tissue to replace those that failed during injury or disease.
Development: a cross between a mouse and a human
American and Canadian researchers are currently trying to create a creepy hybrid between a mouse and a human
Alex Doron
American and Canadian researchers are currently trying to create a creepy hybrid between a mouse and a human: the mouse's body will be built from a mixture of mouse and human stem cells.
Stem cells are the basic cells in the embryo, from which all types of cells in the body develop. In the laboratory, these cells proliferate continuously and do not differentiate into different types of tissues. The scientists call the cells created in this unsorted culture "rows". The goal of this experiment, which is led by Dr. Ali Rivanello, a biologist and stem cell expert from Rockefeller University, is to test whether "rows" of human embryonic stem cells can be used in the future for transplantation in patients with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer and heart disease.
In Israel, researchers from Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have already succeeded in implanting in a chicken embryo stem cells taken from a human embryo. The embryo's development stopped when its spine was partly made of chicken cells, and a small part - of human cells. The experiment was designed to test only the feasibility of this special combination.
The creation of the hybrid mouse, known as the "chimeric mouse", raises many ethical questions. Some researchers oppose this, fearing that in the future scientists will try to create mice whose bodies will produce human sperm cells or eggs. These scientists fear that at some point the experiment will "go wild", and a chimeric male will accidentally mate with a chimeric female mouse: the result could be the creation of a monster.
