
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, May 4, 1990                   TAG: 9005040123
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

BRAIN CELLS GROWN IN LAB

Brain tissue from a child has been nurtured into a colony of living cells that eventually may be used to replace damaged cells of people who suffer from Alzheimer's, stroke or head injury.

Dr. Solomon Snyder of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore said his research team has, for the first time, developed a continuous culture of human brain cells that divide and grow in laboratory dishes.

Other researchers called the discovery one of "tremendous significance."

Years of studies will be needed before the cells can be used on human patients, Snyder said. His study is published in today's edition of the journal Science.

Scientists have long been hampered in their study of the brain because brain cells won't reproduce. Except for very few exceptions in isolated brain areas, humans at birth have all the brain cells they ever will. If many of those cells are damaged, functions they control are lost.

Snyder said in a telephone interview that the cultured cells underwent 3 1/2 years of testing to assure they are not an abnormal growth, but normal brain cells.

"We have every confidence that they will function that way when transplanted," Snyder said. "If they were placed into the environment of the brain, we would expect them to be functional."

Brains damaged by degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, or by stroke or trauma, may one day be repaired by transplanting cells grown from the brain cells cultured in Snyder's lab, he said.

"That's what we're working on," he said. "That is our full intent."

by CNB