Monday, May 20, 2013
Stem-cell-based strategy boosts immune system in mice
Summary:
Researchers at the University of California in San Francisco have created the first working human thymus tissue in a laboratory. This tissue is used, by the body, to produce white blood cells, and more specifically, T-cells. White blood cells not only help keep your body healthy, but also can prevent harmful autoimmune diseases. This means that there soon might be new therapies for autoimmune diseases, like type-1 diabetes.
Relevance:
This article is relevant to our studies of the human body systems. This unit, the Human Body Systems III unit, we are studying the immune system. Here, these researchers created a working thymus tissue, which produces white blood cells. This also connects to out previous unit about the circulatory system. The thymus tissue produces white blood cells, which, we learned, are made in the bone marrow and are pumped from the heart through arteries, capillaries, and veins around the body.
Author: Not Given
Published: May 16, 2013
Link: http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2013/05/16/stemcellbased_strategy_boosts_immune_system_in_mice.html
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If there were there any attempts to grow a thymus in a lab before, why were they unsuccessful?
ReplyDeleteI do not know whether this was attempted before, but it probably was. To grow this thymus tissue, the scientists must start with an embryonic stem cell and use "a unique combination of growth factors to shape the developmental trajectory of the cells, and eventually hit upon a formula that yield[s] functional thymus tissue" (http://scitechdaily.com/researchers-generate-immune-responses-from-stem-cell-grown-thymus-tissue/). This means that it is probably very hard to get this combination exactly right, and, therefore, previous attempts, where this combination wasn't exactly right, were unsuccessful.
Deletewas the thymus tissue artificial or were they just able to create more copies of a human T-cell?
ReplyDeleteAs I said above, the tissue wasn't originally from a thymus, but from an embryonic stem cell, so it was therefore artificial.
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