Study promises advances in the treatment of fetal defects

Washington - U.S. researchers found in studies with guinea pigs, because they failed fetal transplants of stem cells, considered very promising in the treatment of congenital problems before birth. While surveys indicate a maternal cause for this failure, the scientists stress that the solution can also be the mother, according to research done on mice and published in this Tuesday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The problem may be that doctors were trying to implant in the fetal stem cells that coincided with his bone marrow, but the mother's immune system understand these new cells as a threat and rejected. But when implanting stem cells that coincided with the mother, the scientists observed a success rate of about 100%, the study said.

"The research is very exciting because it gives a simple and elegant solution that makes the transplant Fetal stem cells is an attainable goal, "said lead study author, Tippi MacKenzie, University of California at San Francisco (UCSF, U.S. West)." Now we have for the first time, a viable strategy for treating disorders congenital stem cells before birth, "it added.

If the process works in humans, doctors can treat a wide variety of immune hereditary disorders that can be detected through prenatal testing, such as sickle cell anemia, thalassemia, and other chronic granulomatosis. "It was surprising that the fetal transplants of stem cells will not give good results, especially the widely accepted dogma that the immature immune system of the fetus can adapt to tolerate foreign substances, "said Qizhi Tang, coauthor of the study's research laboratory in transplantation at UCSF." The extraordinary of our study is that the culprit is the mother's immune system, "he added.

Scientists hope, then, to examine whether the observed process that works in humans.

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