MYELIN, the fatty coating that surrounds nerve fibres, is progressively
destroyed in the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis. But last week,
researchers announced that they had successfully regenerated myelin around the
spinal nerves of monkeys using cells that coat nerves in the brains of pigs.
Jeffrey Kocsis of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and his
colleagues injected cells from pigs into nerves that had been stripped of
myelin. After five weeks, there were signs of regeneration in four out of eight
monkeys. 鈥淣o one is saying this is a panacea, but we鈥檙e getting regeneration and
we鈥檙e very excited about that,鈥� says Kocsis, who presented the work at a meeting
on xenotransplantation in Nagoya, Japan, last week.