Scientists use human stem cells to treat muscular dystrophy in mice

Italian and French scientists report in the new issue of Cell Stem Cells that they extracted adult stem cells from people suffering from muscular dystrophy, genetically modified them into mice with the same muscledisease
, and achieved significant therapeutic resultsThe report says the results of this experimental therapy mean that the medical community is moving one step closer to treating muscular dystrophy with an entomisure stem cell transplantIn the future, if the stem cells taken from the patient can be genetically modified and replanted back into the patient to treat the disease, we can effectively avoid the rejection reaction brought about by traditional myoblast transplant ational treatmentThere are different types of muscular dystrophy, and scientists at the University of Milan in Italy and a French research institute have chosen the most common,and deadliest patients with Du's muscular dystrophyAccording to statistics
,the world's average of one in 3,500 newborn boys suffer from the diseasePatients develop muscle weakness or atrophybefore school age due to constant deterioration of skeletal muscle,inconvenience to walkAbout 7 to 1
2
years of age
, will completely lose the ability to walk , usually in the 20 s of will die due to heart muscle , lung muscle weakness At present, there is no effective treatment in the medical field for the of the disease Studies have shown that Du's muscular dystrophy is a genetic disease , and that a mutation in a gene that encodes a key muscle protein in the patient's body is the main cause of the disease In the experiment, the scientists isolated adult stem cells from the patient's muscles and blood, then applied genetic engineering techniques to repair the disease-causing genes and implant the genetically modified stem cells into the muscles of sick laboratory mice It was found that modified genes were re-expressed and correctly encoded key muscle proteins to promote the production of muscle cells in mice In terms of efficacy, the mice's already atrophied muscles became significantly stronger Mice with stem cells were able to run on a treadmill longer than the mice in the control group However, their muscles are still not as strong as healthy mice In addition, study leader , University of Milan' Ivan Tolent, said the treatment needs to do a lot of research to improve its safety and efficacy before it can be applied to human clinical trials