Ciara Curtin is a freelance science and health journalist based in Atlanta. She is a graduate of New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting program and has been covering science and technology since 2006. She takes an interest in the cutting edge and the offbeat.
Bio + Life Sciences
Could Reprogrammed Cells Fight “Untreatable” Diseases?
Jeanne Loring and her Scripps Research Institute colleagues transplanted a set of cells into the spinal cords of mice that had lost use of their hind limbs to multiple sclerosis. As the experimentalists expected, within a week, the mice rejected the cells. But after another week, the mice began to walk. "We thought that they wouldn't do anything," says Loring, who directs the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Scripps. But as her lab has since shown numerous times, something that these particular so-called "neural precursor cells" do before the immune system kicks them out seems to make the mouse better.
