Frontiers in NEUROSCIENCE, April 2014
Therapeutic potential of neural stem cells: greater in people's perception than in their brains?
Elena Cattaneo 1 and Luca Bonfanti 2,3
The discovery that the mammalian brain contains neural stem cells, and that such cells produce new neurons during adulthood through a process known as "adult neurogenesis," led to the hypothesis that their underlying biology could be exploited for central nervous system (CNS) repair purposes.
Yet, in spite of the large amount of knowledge gathered on adult neurogenesis during the last two decades, no substantial translational advances have been reached for most neurological diseases (Rossi and Cattaneo, 2002; Arenas, 2010; Lindvall and Kokaia, 2010).
This may be linked to the intrinsic complexity of the nervous tissue at the structural, developmental, and evolutionary level, that preclude cell regeneration and repair (Weil et al., 2008; Bonfanti, 2011). As a result, neural cell replacement is at present not possible neither by implementation of endogenous neurogenic potential nor through transplantation of highly neurogenic stem cell sources. [ read more ]
1
Department of BioSciences, Center for Stem Cell Research, University of Milan, Milano, Italy
2
Department of Veterinary Sciences, University of Turin, Torino, Italy
3
Neuroscience Institute Cavalieri Ottolenghi, University of Turin, Orbassano, Italy
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