Human ESCs used in pioneering spinal injury treatment

The use of hESC (human embryonic stem cell) antibodies may be a controversial subject, but they are proving their worth. Back in 2000, the Geron corporation reported successful culturing the first neural cells from hESCs. Now, they’ve just conducted the world’s first human clinical trial, injecting hESCs into the spinal cord of a paralysed patient to generate new neural cells and overcome the paralysis. If it works, it will revolutionise the world of cell-based therapies.

Stem cell research has come on in leaps and bounds in the last 15 years, with thousands of stem cell marker antibodies and proteins being developed. Embryonic stem cells are particularly of interest due to their pluripotency – the ability to spontaneously clump into embryoid bodies and form different cell types. Over the years, scientists have found ways to engineer this, altering culture environments and inserting particular genes to generate specific cell lines for clinical research. This is especially useful in cells that are difficult to generate from adult lines, as in neural cells.

Neural cell generation from hESCs has been of interest for over a decade, with a number of studies in the 1990s showing reversal of Parkinson’s-type symptoms in animal models. This led researchers to wonder if ESCs could be used to repair spinal cord damage. Complete repair in the event of severation of the spinal cord was considered unlikely, owing to destruction of complex signal-carrying neurons. However, many spinal injuries do not result in complete cutting of the spinal cord, but the loss of oligodendrocytes leading to demyelination of the axon sheath.

In 1999 Lu, McDonald et al showed that transplanted ESCs could promote recovery of demyelinated rat spinal cords, differentiating into and replacing oligodendrocytes. Now, researchers from the Geron corporation have taken it to the next level, using hESC-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cells(GRNOPC1line).

We at Novus Biologicals have a large stem cell antibody catalogue, with over 470 proteins, lysates, RNAi and antibodies covering embryonic stem cells.

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