( l the body's muscles appeared to be po...)Research casts doubt on circulating stem cells

l the body's muscles, appeared to be potentially treatable ?indeed, by the simple means of transplanting healthy bone marrow. For boys, DMD is the second most common hereditary disease. Due to a genetic defect, the muscles fail to produce properly functioning dystrophin, an important muscle protein. Those affected develop progressive muscle wasting. They only have a life expectancy of 15 to 20 years.

"In mice with DMD we have replaced the bone marrow with healthy marrow marked by a fluorescent gene," explains Bonn physiologist Professor Dr. Anton Wernig. The hope of the medical scientists is that the transplanted stem cells will find their way through the blood into damaged muscle fibres where they can produce functioning dystrophin. The Bonn researcher team was in fact able to detect green-fluorescent stem cell nuclei in the muscle fibre for several months after the bone marrow transplantation. And, as Professor Wernig emphasises, "they were found in numbers that would have had to bring a significant improvement to the condition of the muscle." The next step was to find out whether the stem cell nuclei were actually producing muscle proteins. Here, the results were negative: "If at all, very few nuclei produced dystrophin ?in any case, far too few to achieve any improvement in the condition." The physiologist concludes, "Although the cells do merge with the defective muscle, we suspect that they remain silent and cannot set off the hoped-for 'muscle programme'." In other words, the bone marrow-derived cells are not converted into functioning muscle fibre.

The myth of a circulating jack of all trades

The reason is probably that in nearly all cells released into the blood from bone marrow many genes are permanently "switched off" and the cells cannot simply be switched back on again. After all, what comes from bone marrow is generally blood and not muscle tissue. The story of a "jack of all trades" circulating via the blood stream throughout t
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Source:University of Bonn

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