A round-up of this week's otehr medical news in brief ...
Growing real teeth from stem cell seeds
Fully functional teeth have been grown from stem cell “seeds” planted in the mouths of mice, scientists reported yesterday.
The technique could one day be used to replace lost teeth in humans or even rebuild whole organs, they believe.
The Japanese scientists developed a bioengineered “tooth germ” – a seed-like package containing all the cells and instructions necessary to form a tooth.
A number of these were implanted into the jaw bones of mice which had earlier had molar back teeth removed.
The “tooth germs” sprouted fully formed teeth in the gaps left by the extractions.
To make them easier to see, they incorporated a green fluorescent protein which glowed under ultraviolet light.
The engineered teeth were as hard as their natural counterparts and threaded with nerve fibres which responded to pain.
The research was reported yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Silencing the gene that causes inherited epilepsy
Inherited epilepsy can be halted by silencing the gene responsible for it, a study has shown.
Researchers bred the defect out of epileptic mice by balancing “good” and “bad” genes. They hope the research will lead to new ways of preventing the disorder in humans.
Scientists at the University of Leeds studied a strain of mouse called Myshkin, which has an inherited form of severe epilepsy.
The mice had a defective version of the gene Atp1a3 which led them to suffer spontaneous seizures.
Mice treated with the anti-epilepsy drug valproic acid had fewer, less severe attacks.
When the Myshkin mice were bred with genetically engineered animals having an extra copy of the normal Atp1a3 gene, they produced healthy offspring, completely free of epilepsy.
The additional normal gene counterbalanced the effect of the faulty gene, according to the researchers writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.