Adult human brain stem cells 1

Tissue repair using cell transplantation holds popular appeal. This underlines the need to understand stem cells within the target organ. Our laboratory works on the human brain. Using neurosphere methods, we and others have only been able to passage stem/progenitors a very few times with little expansion of numbers. Now we describe an efficient method for the establishment and propagation of human brain stem cells from whatever tissue samples we have tried. We describe virtually unlimited expansion of an authentic stem cell phenotype. Pluripotency markers Sox2 and Oct4 are expressed without artificial induction. For the first time, multipotency of adult human brain-derived stem cells is demonstrated beyond tissue boundaries. We characterize these cells in detail in vitro including microarray and proteomic approaches. Whilst clarification of these cells' behavior is ongoing, results so far portend well for the future repair of tissues by transplantation of an adult patient's own-derived stem cells. Adult human brain stem cells from the subventricular zone were compared to those from hippocampus. Total RNA from three adult human brain biopsy sources: 3 subventricular-derived cell lines and 3 hippocampus-derived cell lines.