Endocrine Abstracts

Mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells are pluripotent cells derived from preimplantation embryo. In culture these cells can differentiate into a broad variety of cell types, such as nerve, muscle heart, blood cells and islet cells. This capacity for multilineage differentiation is retained during genetic manipulation and in vitro propagation. This has stimulated interest in the isolation of analogous cells of human origin. Such human pluripotent cells would constitute a renewable so...

Neurodegenerative diseases are characterised by the loss of specific subsets of neurons, and whilst drug therapies exist for some of these disorders (eg Parkinson's disease) none of them are curative. This has led to the search for a cell-based therapy, the most successful being the transplantation of human fetal tissue into Parkinson's patients. However, there are ethical and logistical problems associated with this tissue collection, hence an alternative source has been soug...

The need for new therapeutic options in diabetes has become increasingly apparent. Until recently transplantation of isolated islets has had limited success. The Edmonton Protocol has described how many of the problems can be overcome, but has highlighted the need to develop methods of expanding islets cells in culture to provide sufficient tissue to meet the potentially huge demand for this treatment. We have focused on three approaches: 1. deriving replicating human Beta cel...

For more than a dozen years, a major combined biological and clinical research endeavour has been dedicated to the set up of new therapeutics based upon cell and gene therapy for neurodegenerative diseases. This research essentially takes into account two determinant characteristics of all these diseases, that can be briefly summarised as follows: 1. a neurodegenerative disease is due to the loss of one or a small number of specific populations of neurones, allowing in some ca...