Adult stem cells tackle multiple sclerosis

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Adult stem cells tackle multiple sclerosis 19:00 16 April 03 NewScientist.com news service Treatment with adult stem cells has cured mice suffering with a form of multiple sclerosis, say Italian researchers. Almost a third of the mice recovered completely from paralysis of their back legs, and the rest all showed substantial improvement. "It was amazing," says Angelo Vescovi, of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan. He has now begun experiments giving human adult stem cells to monkeys with the nerve and brain damage seen in MS. But he warns that success in mice does not guarantee success in humans: "I wouldn't want to raise expectations." Vescovi, Gianvito o and colleagues injected the diseased mice with stem cells that had been extracted from the brains of adult mice and multiplied in the lab. The cells were injected in the bloodstream or spinal cord. Postmortems on the mice showed that the stem cells had migrated to and then repaired damaged areas of the nerves and brain. In particular, the myelin sheaths of nerve cells were restored, after having been worn away.