By Danielle H. Cho – Daily Bruin –
UCLA researchers have found a gene that may have implications for treating blood-related genetic diseases and cancers.
All types of blood cells come from blood stem cells, said Júlia Aguadé-Gorgorió, the first author of the paper that presented the findings and a former assistant project scientist. Blood stem cells can be taken from a healthy person, cultured and transplanted to reconstitute a patient’s blood for life, she added.
However, Aguadé-Gorgorió said cells grown in culture – outside a living organism in a petri dish – often struggle to multiply to adequate numbers and fail to travel to and settle in the bone marrow. She added that the failure of such cells to reach the bone marrow is an indicator of them losing their stem cell properties.
The questions driving the study were related to blood stem cells losing their functionality in culture, said Dr. Hanna Mikkola, the study’s corresponding author and a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology.
