THE curative properties of stem cells may rely on the healthy counterparts of the rogue prions that are the root cause of BSE.
While we know that abnormal prions cause BSE in cows, and vCJD in humans, the role of healthy prions is not clear. Now researchers at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have discovered that adult stem cells in bone marrow lose the ability to regenerate when their cell membranes are stripped of prions.
Andrew Steele and Cheng Cheng Zhang used radiation to deplete the bone marrow of mice engineered so that they couldn’t produce prions. The animals’…
