Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Key stem cell research events

  • 1960s - Joseph Altman and Gopal Das present scientific evidence of adult neurogenesis, ongoing stem cell activity in the brain; their reports contradict Cajal's "no new neurons" dogma and are largely ignored.

  • 1963 - McCulloch and Till illustrate the presence of self-renewing cells in mouse bone marrow.




  • 1992 - Neural stem cells are cultured in vitro as neurospheres.

  • 1997 - Leukemia is shown to originate from a haematopoietic stem cell, the first direct evidence for cancer stem cells.



  • 2001 - Scientists at Advanced Cell Technology clone first early (four- to six-cell stage) human embryos for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells.[30]

  • 2003 - Dr. Songtao Shi of NIH discovers new source of adult stem cells in children's primary teeth.[31]


  • 2005 - Researchers at Kingston University in England claim to have discovered a third category of stem cell, dubbed cord-blood-derived embryonic-like stem cells (CBEs), derived from umbilical cord blood. The group claims these cells are able to differentiate into more types of tissue than adult stem cells.


  • October 2006 - Scientists in England create the first ever artificial liver cells using umbilical cord blood stem cells.[32][33]


  • June 2007 - Research reported by three different groups shows that normal skin cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state in mice.[35] In the same month, scientist Shoukhrat Mitalipov reports the first successful creation of a primate stem cell line through somatic cell nuclear transfer[36]



  • January 2008 - Human embryonic stem cell lines were generated without destruction of the embryo[38]


  • February 2008 - Generation of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Mouse Liver and Stomach: these iPS cells seem to be more similar to embryonic stem cells than the previous developed iPS cells and not tumorigenic, moreover genes that are required for iPS cells do not need to be inserted into specific sites, which encourages the development of non-viral reprogramming techniques

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell

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