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Experts Available To Discuss Stem Cells May Repair Spinal Cord Injuries

Posted on: Wednesday, 21 September 2005, 15:00 CDT

TOPIC: Researchers found that partially paralyzed mice were able to walk normally again after being injected with fetal neural stem cells, according to an article by The Associated Press. The new study showed the stem cells not only formed new nerve cells, but also created the biological insulation that is necessary for nerve fibers to communicate. Neurological diseases, including multiple sclerosis, often show a lack of this insulation. The Christopher Reeve Foundation and The National Institutes of Health funded the study, which appears in the recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

EXPERTS: ExpertSource can offer several highly qualified experts to comment on this story:

Dr. Paul Billings is a bioethicist, immunologist, geneticist and renowned authority in internal medicine and clinical genetics, as well as the biology and health impact of stem cells, which he first began experimenting with more than 25 years ago. Dr. Billings has published more than 130 scholarly articles and book chapters in addition to his book, DNA on Trial: Genetic Identification and Criminal Justice. Dr. Billings has testified on many occasions to the United States Congress and to state legislatures on issues involving human genetics. His work and comments appear frequently in major popular media. He chairs the Medical Advisory of Cord Blood Registry, Inc., where he was previously Medical Director. Dr. Billings also is a member of the Board of Directors of the Cord Blood Donor Foundation. He currently provides advice on research and development to many large companies in the Life Sciences and Pharma sectors and is an active affiliate of the Institute of the Future.

Dr. Claire Hulsebosch is the project director of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Consortium, where her efforts are focused on the development of chronic central pain in spinal cord injury. She also has expertise in brain trauma and stroke. Dr. Hulsebosch's research objectives interests are to investigate the development and plasticity of central and peripheral nervous systems, investigate the responses of the central and peripheral nervous systems to various growth factors, and understand basic molecular principles that provide the proper microenvironment for neural sprouting. In addition, her focuses are also on central and peripheral nervous system regeneration mechanisms, as well as molecular aspects of the development and plasticity of these systems using neuroanatomical techniques. She also has also been researching nervous system trauma and the behavioral tests of neurotrauma models that have been developed to assess the success of interventions toward improved recovery of function following central nervous system trauma. Dr. Hulsebosch was awarded a three-year NIH postdoctoral fellowship and came to the Marine Biomedical Institute where she joined the spinal cord research group. She is an active course director of two courses in Cell Biology and the Neuroscience Graduate programs and is involved in medical education as a professor in Human Gross Anatomy. In addition, she has had numerous publications concerning SCI and neurological conditions. Dr. Hulsebosch received her B.A. in biology from Rice University where she was a Jesse H. Jones and Mary Gibbs Jones Scholar. She pursued her interests in central nervous system regeneration as a doctoral dissertation project at The University of Texas at Austin, where she received her Ph.D. in neurosciences from the Department of Zoology.

Dennis Steindler, Ph.D., of the University of Florida, is an expert on adult stem cells who specializes in regenerative medicine, research on adult neural stem cells and their use in testing and treating neurological disease. He is a member of The University of Florida's world-renowned multidisciplinary Program in Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. He also is a professor of neuroscience and neurosurgery at the University of Florida College of Medicine, and is affiliated with UF's McKnight Brain Institute and the UF Shands Cancer Center. The major research goal of Steindler's research is to see the use of stem cell therapy become a major treatment for debilitating neurological diseases. He and his team have been working for 25 years on plasticity and regeneration of the injured adult human brain, and current adult stem cell studies in their lab focus on the use of our own indigenous populations of stem cells in the adult brain to participate in self-repair following neurological disease or injury. There is widespread interest in the use of stem cells for cell replacement therapies in human neurological disease. However, we have only begun to appreciate the cell and molecular biology of these cells, which hold great promise for transplantation or other therapeutics relying on the potential use of our own persistent stem/progenitor cell population in autologous repair paradigms. He is a founder of a stem cell and regeneration medicine company called RegenMed, Inc., that has several patents issued and filed in the stem cell area. Steindler has published extensively on his studies in regenerative medicine and adult neural stem cells in major scientific journals, including the Lancet and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Source: Business Wire

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