Onyi Okolie

Healthy neural stem cells can infiltrate and help treat brain tumors because they naturally migrate toward gliomas in response to chemotactic signals released by the tumor cells. Obtaining neural stem cells from a patient can be difficult, however, and donor stem cells pose a risk of immune rejection and other safety concerns. Bagó et al. have discovered a way to avoid these risks by taking normal human skin fibroblasts and transdifferentiating them into neural stem cells.

U87 human GBM cells and human astrocytes were purchased from American Type Culture Collection (ATCC, Manassas, VA). WTNSC were purchased from StemCell Technologies (Vancouver, Canada). GBM8s were a kind gift from Dr Hiroaki Wakimoto (Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA). 7030, 7081, 7063 and GBM6 were a kind gift from Dr William Weiss (University of California, San Francisco Cancer Center). 293T/17 cells were purchased from the UNC Tissue Culture Facility.