
By: Doug Lee
Re: New brain cells produced

    As part of my morning ritual I opened my front door this morning to
get the morning paper and found the following story on the front page.

After reading it I decided to share it here for the benefit of some in
this echo (Laurie Appletoony comes to mind) who think that "evolutionary
science" is complete bunk.

Ladies and gentelmen, I give you the results of "that bunk".

(NOTE: How long do you think it will take the creationists to turn it into
"evolutionary science fiction"?? :> )


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Saturday 1 February 1997

Mark Lowey, Calgary Herald

Calgary medical scientists have successfully made new brain cells in a
groundbreaking step toward repairing the human brain.

"We've made some major breakthroughs . . . people are going to go, 'wow!'"
Brent Reynolds, research director at NeuroSpheres Ltd., a private company
working on regenerating brain cells, said Friday.

This advance, and others at the University of Calgary, have brought doctors
to the threshold of replacing brain cells destroyed by Parkinson's and
Huntington's diseases. The research also opens the door to repairing brains
and spinal cords damaged in accidents.

The scientists are within two years of trying their technology in
brain-injured patients.

In research on laboratory animals, "we've been able to make new brain cells
in the brain" without having to use transplants of brain tissue, Reynolds
said.

In North America alone more than 30 million people suffer from Parkinson's,
Alzheimer's, stroke, head and spinal injuries, Lou Gehrig's and other
neurological disorders. Their health-care costs amount to $164 billion a
year.

The University of Calgary's Samuel Weiss says his research team has
successfully regenerated in the laboratory all three major cell types
present in a normal, healthy brain. The cells were grown using 65-year-old
brain tissue obtained during a biopsy.

"All of a sudden it doesn't seem impossible any longer to replace brain
cells," Weiss, an Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research scholar,
told the Sigma Xi scientific society recently.

Weiss said later the challenge will be to target the healthy new brain cells
on precise locations inside the brain.

"It's important work . . . the chance to actually regenerate neurons in an
injured brain is really exciting," said University of Toronto neuroscientist
Derek van der Kooy, who has collaborated on studies with Weiss at the
University of Calgary.

But van der Kooy also cautioned that it is another big leap from growing the
cells in lab animals to having an effective treatment in patients.

In March 1992, Weiss and Reynolds, who was at the time a medical graduate
student, stunned the world scientific community by discovering the brain has
the potential to repair itself. They found a stem cell (the job of which is
to grow new cells) in the adult mouse brain. When stimulated by cell-growth
chemicals, the stem cell produced new neurons, the nerve cells that "wire"
the brain.

Since the discovery NeuroSpheres has isolated human stem cells, grown
millions of brain cells in the laboratory, and transplanted cells into
several hundred test animals, Reynolds said.

"I'll be surprised if these (lab-grown brain cells) don't go into people
in two years," he added.

NeuroSpheres is collaborating with clinical transplant groups in Canada,
the U.S. and Europe.

Reynolds said company scientists also have learned how to directly
manipulate the stem cells while they're still inside the mammalian brain and
spinal cord.

That opens the door to regenerating cells inside a patient -- without cell
transplants.

Weiss said his university team hopes to show within a year that motor-nerve
cells in the spinal cord can be regenerated, to reverse cell loss due to
disabling amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease.

The Calgary work has been published in top journals, including a recent
paper by Weiss' team in The Journal of Neuroscience.

NeuroSpheres, formed after the 1992 discovery made headlines across North
America, now has 25 employees and ongoing funding from Novartus, a giant
pharmaceutical corporation.


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... Is that simple enough, or will you require Barney to sing it to you?

