MS lesions within the brain and spinal cord are produced when inflammatory processes mistakenly attack myelin, the insulating sheath around nerve fibres. It has long been thought that the reconstitution and repair of damaged myelin might help reverse disease. One way to achieve this would be to provide the body with new myelin-producing cells, known as oligodendrocytes, to rebuild the myelin which has been lost. This is the goal of stem cell research, which uses reprogrammed cells that are capable of developing into many different cell types to treat disease. Often, the focus of MS research has been on how to generate and treat myelin loss with oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs), the precursor cells that develop into oligodendrocytes.
This has previously been achieved with stem cells made from foetal tissue, but researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Centre are the first to successfully create OPCs from skin cells.Read on
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