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| Vol. 24, No. 17 |
| September 15, 2002 |
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Brain Cells Can't be Produced From Bone Marrow Stem Cells By ANISSA ANDERSON ORR Baylor College of Medicine Even though previous research has suggested that adult bone marrow stem cells could produce the kinds of cells usually found in the brain, it now appears this is not a common occurrence and may only happen under special experimental conditions, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in a report in the Aug. 23 issue of the journal Science. In an unusual publication of "negative" data, David Shine, Ph.D., Margaret Goodell, Ph.D., and Raymond Castro, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues described their futile efforts to persuade bone marrow stem cells to produce neural cells, those found in the brain and nervous system. Previous authors had used whole bone marrow, and Shine, an associate professor in the department of neurosurgery and a member of Baylor's Center for Cell and Gene Therapy, and his team decided to try the experiment with highly purified bone marrow stem cells, called side population, or SP, cells. Previously, Goodell, an assistant professor in Baylor's Center for Cell and Gene Therapy, found that SP cells could not only reconstitute the whole bone marrow but also differentiate into heart muscle and the cells that line the walls of blood vessels. In their studies, the scientists attempted to get the SP cells to differentiate in normal and brain-injured mice. They also transplanted unpurified bone marrow cells into normal and brain-injured mice, a move that was undertaken by previous researchers. They found no evidence of brain cells deriving from the SP or bone marrow transplants. The only cells related to the SP cells they found were a few similar to blood-forming cells located near blood vessels in the brain. These results call into question the notion that a patient's bone marrow cells could be converted into brain cells that could be used to treat diseases of the nervous system such as Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease. "These data suggest that 'bone to brain' transdifferentiation may not be a general phenomenon but may depend on the experimental system in which the hypothesis is tested," the Baylor authors wrote in their paper. In the new era of research with stem cells of all kinds, this represents a time when "all the data are settling out," said Goodell. "It is now time to work on the biology of stem cells and determine what adult stem cells and pluripotent embryonic stem cells can actually do in the laboratory," she said. Others on the team included Kathyjo A. Jackson, Ph.D., Claudia S. Robertson, M.D. and Hao Liu, M.D. The research was funded by Mission Connect, a project of the TIRR Foundation.
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