Source: Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute
Date: March 1, 2011
Summary:
When patients receive a bone marrow transplant, they are getting a new population of hematopoietic stem cells. Fresh stem cells are needed when a patient is low on red blood cells, as in anemia, or white blood cells, which can be caused by cancer or even cancer treatments such as irradiation or chemotherapy. The problem is that a bone marrow transplant might not succeed because the transplanted stem cells don't live long enough or because they proliferate too well, leading to leukemia.
To help determine how long a bone marrow (stem cell) graft will last, researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) have developed a mathematical model that predicts how long a stem cell will live and tested those predictions in a mouse model. The study, led by Christa Muller-Sieburg, Dr. rer. nat., was published online the week of February 28, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
