Making neural cells for human therapy or drug screening from human embryonic stem cells

Patent Number: 6833269

Despite all the publicity of embryonic stem cell therapy, the fact that embryonic stem cells turn into cancer cells when inserted into a living organism suggests the very import need to understand and develop ways of manipulating them to differentiate into the tissue that is needed to be repaired.

This patent teaches conditions for generating neural cells from embryonic stem cells through incubation of the embryonic stem cells with various proteins called neurotrophins. Interestingly, it is reported by others that neurotrophins can not only induce differentiation of embryonic stem cells into neurons, but also bone marrow derived stem cells *Zhang W et al. Combination of adenoviral vector-mediated neurotrophin-3 gene transfer and retinoic acid promotes adult bone marrow cells to differentiate into neuronal phenotypes, Neurosci Lett. 2006 Nov 13;408(2):98-103. *

It is also believed that bone marrow stem cells can make certain factors that stimulate endogenous brain stem cells to secrete neurotrophins * Munoz JR et al. Human stem/progenitor cells from bone marrow promote neurogenesis of endogenous neural stem cells in the hippocampus of mice. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Dec 13;102(50):18171-6. "

View this patent on the USPTO website.