After cancer has spread its tentacles through the body, a cure can be almost as bad as the disease. High-dose chemotherapy can kill roaming tumor cells, but it also takes out the vital "stem cells" in the bone marrow that make blood. A marrow transplant can replenish these cells, but it leaves the patient exposed to attack by foreign immune cells in the grafted tissue. What the body desperately needs is a way to regenerate itself.
Stephen Bartelmez and Tsvee Lapidot are searching for a way to take a small sample of stem cells from a patient before chemotherapy, grow the cells into a large population, and then return them to rebuild the bone marrow. Bartelmez, an immunologist at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, just successfully cultured stem cells from mice. Shortly after, Lapidot, a hematologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, performed the same feat with ...
