Enriched central nervous system stem cell and progenitor cell populations, and methods for identifying, isolating and enriching for such populations

Patent Number: 7037719

This patent teaches how to isolate neuronal stem cells from human fetal brain. The stem cells, or I guess more appropriately, "progenitor cells", are isolated based on positive expression of AC133, binding to the antibody 5E12 (don’t know what that is), and negative for CD34 and CD45. The patent has 6 independent claims which cover the population of CD34-, CD45-, AC133+, 5E12+ cells. In the first 5 independent claims the "method for producing a population highly enriched for human central nervous system stem cells" is covered, whereas in the last independent claim "A method for isolating a neurosphere initiating stem cell (NS-IC)" is covered. A paper that seems to describe this patent is Uchida N, et al. Direct isolation of human central nervous system stem cells. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2000 Dec 19;97(26):14720-5.). In this paper the authors isolated the cells claimed in the patent using flow cytometry sorting and succeeded at initiating neurosphere cultures. They demonstrated that the cells from the neurosphere culture could be induced to undergo differentiation into neurons and glial cells. The phenomena of self-renewal of the stem cell...or progenitor...was demonstrated by observations that cells from the neurosphere with the CD133 CD34 CD45 phenotype were able, when replated, to establish new neurospheres. Even more interestingly was the observation that when cells with this phenotype where introduced into the brains of mice (immune deficient) engraftment, proliferation, and differentiation into neurons was observed.

View this patent on the USPTO website.