SCIENCE amp TECHNOLOGY NEWS FROM THE REPUBLIC OF KOREA, MAY 2005英文资料.pdfVIP

SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY NEWS FROM THE REPUBLIC OF KOREA, MAY 2005 Hwang Clones Patient-Specific Stem Cells (The Korea Times, May 20, 2005) Seoul National University professor Hwang Woo-suk and his 20-plus colleagues achieved their second-round medical feat of cloning stem cells genetically matched to patients for the first time in history. Hwang derived 11 embryonic stem cell lines by cloning 11 patients, both male and female of various ages ranging between 2 to 56, suffering from diseases or spinal cord injury. It is a remarkable progress from last year’s first-round success when his team established just a single stem cell line by cloning the somatic cell of a healthy woman. The exploit will be featured in the next edition of the U.S.-based journal Science and the article is available from today on its Web site (). The stem cells are specifically tailored to match the nuclear DNA of patients as they were directly cloned from the patients’ cells. They transformed the nuclear genetic materials from somatic cells of individuals with serious diseases or disabilities into a donated egg, of which the nucleus had already been removed. The work is expected to move scientists one step closer to the goal of transplanting healthy cells into humans to replace cells damaged by diseases such as Parkinson’s and diabetes without causing a rejection by the body’s immune system. The 51-year-old Hwang wrote in the Science article that he confirmed these cell lines displayed signs of immune compatibility with the patients’ cells. In addition, Hwang’s team demonstrated that they can consistently extract a cell line in under 20 attempts by substantially enhancing the efficiency of their experiments. They got 1 1 stem cell lines from 125 eggs donated by 10 women. Last year, they pulled out just a small batch from 242 attempts. International embryologists and researchers in other fields hailed Hwang’s achievement. Actually