Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
When neurons started dying in Clive Svendsen’s lab dishes, he couldn’t have been more pleased.
“The novelty is that this is a combined cell and gene therapy approach,” Suzuki explains, noting that the bone marrow stem cells on their own had a modest effect, possibly by releasing their own protective factors. “But only when we engineered the cells to release GDNF did we see a significant improvement. The cells turned out to be quite an important component. It’s this combination of cells and drug delivery that seems to be so effective.”
Some of Madison’s most precious assets are deep-frozen in vials at University Research Park. The National Stem Cell Bank, the country’s only official repository of human embryonic stem cells, is housed at the WiCell Research Institute, a nonprofit organization affiliated with UW-Madison.
Two years after the National Institutes of Health created the National Stem Cell Bank, managers say the bank is starting to fulfill its mission: gathering the cells in one place, controlling their quality and shipping them to scientists at low cost.
With the help of a $7.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers will explore the potential of stem cells and natural growth factors to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
In a study that demonstrates the promise of cell-based therapies for diseases that have proved intractable to modern medicine, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has shown it is possible to rescue the dying neurons characteristic of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neuromuscular disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
In an effort to strengthen and sustain its leadership in the companion fields of stem cell research and regenerative medicine, the University of Wisconsin-Madison will establish a new Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center.
For the millions of Americans whose vision is slowly ebbing due to degenerative diseases of the eye, the lowly neural progenitor cell may be riding to the rescue. In a study in rats, neural progenitor cells derived from human fetal stem cells have been shown to protect the vision of animals with degenerative eye disease similar to the kinds of diseases that afflict humans.
Using neural stem cells derived from the fetal brains of rats, a team of Wisconsin scientists has devised a rudimentary blood-brain barrier in the lab.
One of the great challenges for treating Parkinson’s diseases and other neurodegenerative disorders is getting medicine to the right place in the brain.
