Stem cells and MS – the hype and the hope
Sun 12.30 - 13.30 (H1)
Biography: Prof. Robin Franklin
Professor of Neuroscience, University of Cambridge
Undergraduate degrees in Physiology
and Veterinary Medicine, and PhD in
Neuroscience, spending his entire career
at Cambridge, where he is working
on the biology of myelin repair and
investigating strategies by which this
regenerative process may be enhanced
therapeutically. He has published over
180 papers and reviews on this topic.
His has focused on the possibility
of enhancing remyelination through
stimulating endogenous population of
adult stem/precursor cells (including
OPCs). He has been at the forefront
of studying the cellular and molecular
mechanisms of remyelination,
describing the mechanisms by which adult stem/precursor cells are
recruited to areas of demyelination
and the extrinsic and intrinsic factors
that regulate their differentiation into
remyelinating oligodendrocytes.
These studies have identified, inter alia, the role of growth factors, the innate immune response, phagocytic removal of myelin debris and notch-jagged signalling as environmental regulators of remyelination. He has also worked extensively on transcriptional control of differentiation and together with collaborators at Harvard his lab identified Olig1 as a key component of this process.
Director of the UK MS Society Cambridge Centre for Myelin Repair, a consortium of Cambridge-based scientists and clinicians working towards stem cellbased therapies for myelin repair and axon protection in MS. Director: Neural Stem Cell Programme at the MRC Cambridge Centre for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.
Abstract
Stem cells are rarely out of the news these days. All manner of claims are made for their ability to cure a wide range of intractable diseases including MS: some of these claims are realistic and offer real hope; others are fanciful or downright misleading.
In the first part of this talk an explanation will be given of what is meant by the term ‘stem cell’ and the various types of stem cells (such as embryonic, adult, neural and bone marrow stem cells) will be described.
The second part of the talk will be an account will be given of how different types of stem cells can be used to either prevent damage from occurring (a use of stem cells already in clinical trials) or to repair damage (a use not yet in clinical trials but which recent experimental studies suggest holds great promise).
