News & Events
Huge advance in MND research
01 August 2008
Research carried out by American scientists who have generated ‘patient-specific’ stem cells from people living with Motor Neurone Disease (MND) holds great promise for advancing MND research.
This is the first time that such patient-specific cells have been generated in medical research and crucially the first time that stem cells have been converted into motor neurones for MND research.
The motor neurones were generated using a new technique that reprogrammes human adult skin cells into cells that resemble embryonic stem cells. The technique used to make these cells – called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – was a major advance in this field and was first reported in November 2007 by researchers in Japan and Wisconsin, America.
Those studies however, used skin cells from healthy adults but it remained unknown whether iPS cells could be established with cells from chronically-ill patients and then transformed into neurones. The American researchers have shown that this was possible using the skin cells from people living with MND. In the study, two elderly sisters with a rare inherited form of MND donated their skin cells for this research.
Dr Belinda Cupid from the MND Association says: “This new technique has been performed on the most challenging of MND cases due to the age of the patients involved. These results are exciting because they open the door for research into the more common forms of MND which occur for no apparent reason.”
She continues: “There is no better model to understand MND than using the genetic make up of somebody with the condition as this gives us the best ideas of what is going wrong in MND and ultimately will provide the lynch pin to develop new treatments.”
For more information about what this means for people living with MND and MND research read our News in Research pages.
Visit the Harvard Stem Cell Institute website for more information about their role in this research study.
Visit the Columbia University Medical Center for more information about their role in this research study.
