CAN’T stand hobbling around in your cast? Perhaps there’s a way out. Mice with broken legs seem to be healing three times faster than normal, thanks to a protein that makes stem cells divide.
, and colleagues at Stanford University in California drilled small holes into the shin bones of mice, then injected , which prompt bone stem cells to divide. Three days later, bone growth was three times greater than in mice injected with a placebo (Science Translational Medicine, ).
This approach stimulates bone growth temporarily and so might be better than adding new stem cells, which can divide uncontrollably.
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